Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum
by GhostForce1911
Summary: AU. Abducted by Loki, rescued by Thor, Harry grows up fast in a much wider universe than he ever imagined existed. Trained extensively by the Asgard, he is now ready to set his own course in life. The Goa'uld need dealing with, and he has questions concerning his own past and powers - the answers to which will only be found on Earth, at Hogwarts, whatever that is. HP/SC eventually.
1. Act 1, Chapter 1 - The Story So Far

**Disclaimer**: I don't own anything

Please do read this Prescript, it's there for a reason.

**Credit**: If anyone thinks the opening of this is similar to keiranhalcyon2010's 'Harry Potter: An Ancient's Journey', then don't be annoyed – that story was what gave me the idea for this in the first place, and I haven't come up with a better opening.

I asked k'h'2010 for permission to use it, but he/she didn't get back to me. Since the story hasn't been updated in three years or the author's profile in two, I'm just going to go for it.

The opening segment owes also some credits, in this case to Doghead Thirteen's '**Harry Johnson and the Headmaster's Socks**', a truly mad, bad and wonderfully insane science-fiction take on the Potterverse that I highly recommend. Fans of Terry Pratchett (and come on, who isn't) will thoroughly enjoy Doghead's exceptionally crazy story (stories, actually, since it's a series).

1) This chapter is setting the scene, worldbuilding if you will. It's very heavy on narrative description at first – stick with it please, it won't all be like this! I promise!

2) I'm going for a slightly more amusing (or at least, what I consider to be amusing) style of storytelling than in my other ongoing HP/SGA story, Per Ardua ad Astra – don't be surprised if the 'narrator' sounds more than a little sarcastic, because that's how _I_ am in RL.

3) A note on dates – Potterverse dates stay the same, although not everything will happen the same way. Stargate dates are moved 'forward' ten years, making the first Stargate mission (IE Stargate: The Movie) in 2005 rather than in 1995. There are several reasons for this, but I won't explain them here.

4) This is obviously **HEAVILY AU**. Do not expect me to conform to canon in any way, this will probably bear only a bare minimum of resemblance to the original franchises. This is Harry Potter done through a Stargate 'verse-based lens of military science fiction; it will be essentially a completely new version for both.

5a) I haven't decided exactly what will feature/not feature yet, but stuff like Horcruxes, the prophecy, anything I can't think up a pseudoscientific rationale for may well be discarded without warning or explanation.

5b) If you don't like that, or think that JKR's work shouldn't be mutilated this much, I suggest you go re-read hers. This is my corner of the sandbox, thank you very much, I will defend it as viciously as a honeybadger! Unless I get sued. In which case, I'll slink away with a whimper.

If you want an explanation of why I've done certain things in different ways, review/PM me and I'll do my best to explain (if it isn't a spoiler).

With that rant delivered, and if you're still reading, fantastic. Welcome aboard the good ship SVPPB.

* * *

**Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum**

_'If You Wish For Peace, Prepare for War'_

**Act One - Preparation Begins**

* * *

_**Chapter One – The Story So Far …**_

_"Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."_

_David Foster Wallace_

* * *

On the galactic South-East of the barred spiral galaxy known to some of its inhabitants as the Milky Way, there is a set of nine planets orbiting around a basically normal, completely unremarkable G-type yellow star. That star, rather unoriginally, is usually known as 'Sol', if a name other than 'the sun' were to be given for it – as per the usual, Sol simply means 'sun' in one of the more pretentious local languages.

Up until about a million years ago, a planet in this system had been the homeworld of possibly the greatest spacefaring civilisation that this galaxy, and many other galaxies, had ever known. The Alterans did not evolve on this planet, but had been forced from their home galaxy even more millions of years before by a civil war; refusing to fight, they elected to leave entirely and relocated to the Milky Way, which they named 'Avalon.'

They settled on the third planet of the Sol system, and called it 'Terra'; it became the centre of a vast peaceful empire, founded on the bedrock of scientific curiosity and development. The Alterans never stopped asking 'why', and sought to understand everything around them; it is fortunate they were at heart pacifistic, or their discoveries might have destroyed them utterly - and possibly the rest of the galaxy with them.

They established a network of Astria Porta, now known as Stargates or 'chappa'ai', to enable near-instant transportation via stable wormholes between the worlds of their empire; and, while the most widely used, these gates were far from the greatest peak of their achievements. They could manipulate time, access other dimensions, cross into alternate realities, and artificially accelerated their own evolution to a point where they developed such capabilities as telepathy, telekinesis and touch-healing. They established contact with two other reasonably advanced races (although not quite to their level): the Nox and the Furlings. They would meet periodically to trade and discuss matters of mutual concern, and the Alterans assisted the Nox and the Furlings in advancing their development.

However, even the mightiest can be struck down by something tiny; in this case, a microbe. About a million years ago, a plague ran rampant throughout much of the Alteran civilisation in the Milky Way, a plague that even their advanced technology and physiology could not cure. To preserve their species, the Alterans once again uprooted and left, departing with the remainder of the uninfected survivors in the city-ship Atlantis. They seeded their second homeworld, Terra, with the basis of a 'second evolution' of their species, and vanished, apparently for good.

However, it was not the last the Milky Way would see of the Alterans. The remnants returned to Terra via Stargate ten thousand years before the present era, a broken and much-reduced race, the losers in a century-long conflict with an as yet unknown, powerful and implacable enemy that they preferred not to speak of. The few thousand survivors, determining that the 'second evolution' was still too primitive to help re-establish their race and empire, decided to go their separate ways. Some 'ascended', evolving to a higher plane of existence as beings of pure energy, while some departed to travel the Milky Way through their ancient but still-functional wormhole network. A small number remained on Earth, and interbred with the Human population there, passing on a genetic inheritance that would, eventually, become rather important.

Those that departed made contact with their old allies. The Alteran remnant and the other two races re-formed the Great Alliance, now of Four Races, as they were joined by the Asgard, a powerful spacefaring species from the Ida Galaxy. Together they opposed the encroaching power of the parasitic, aggressive Goa'uld - even driving them to the brink of extinction - until all four powers eventually had to give up fighting for various reasons.

The few Alterans remaining either died in combat or ascended, whilst several of the Furlings' key worlds were destroyed in a cataclysmic simultaneous sneak attack by the Goa'uld Ra, wiping out the majority of their population. The much less numerous Nox too suffered significant population decrease as a result of Goa'uld aggression, and adopted a defensive, pacifistic outlook and retreated to their homeworld. The Asgard were forced to withdraw their military resources to their home in the Ida Galaxy due to the emerging threat of the relentless, all-consuming Replicators.

Of the four, only the Asgard maintain even a token amount of opposition to the Goa'uld, forcing them to sign the Protected Planets Treaty before withdrawing. While still in effect, is regarded by both sides as a less-than-satisfactory compromise; however, the Goa'uld are not sufficiently advanced and the Asgard are too over-stretched to force the issue in either direction. Even today, the Asgard are required to dedicate almost the entirety of their race's considerable resources to the continuing containment of the Replicators and research into a way to defeat them, as well as several other critical issues that threaten their race's continued survival.

At some point, the Goa'uld leader, the Supreme System Lord Ra discovered Terra, and found that Humanity made much-improved hosts for their parasitic race. Despite the best efforts of the remaining Alterans in the Alliance, now reduced to just a few dozen, they were unable to force the Goa'uld off their ancestral homeworld. It took five thousand years for humanity to learn that the Goa'uld were not gods, and to throw off Ra's shackles, but by that point millions of humans had been exported across the galaxy as slave labour through the Stargate. Ra no longer required 'Earth' as a source for slaves, and left it in peace.

This would come back to bite him in the ass. Quite spectacularly.

However, some Alterans had used stasis pods to extend their lifespan, to guide the second evolution's development in the future. Unable to force the Goa'uld occupiers off Earth, they chose to wait for such a time as when they could emerge from their cold sleep and begin accelerating the development of humanity, seen particularly in the Roman Empire whose language took heavy influences from Alteran. Centuries after the Romans, one ascended Alteran, now aware of the threat from their oldest adversaries - those who had forced them to abandon their original home galaxy - chose to return to physical form as 'Merlin.' He entrusted his secrets to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, enlisting their aid as he created a weapon that he knew would be needed one day to fight back against those that now called themselves the 'Ori.'

It was during this period that 'Merlin' or Moros, to give him his proper name, became aware of an interesting legacy passed on from Alterans who had interbred with humanity several millennia before. A small percentage of humans exhibited abilities not unlike those of the Alterans' more evolved biological forms. Merlin recruited four especially powerful young 'Wizards' and 'Witches', all with suspiciously alliterative names, and aided them in their attempts to control and refine their powers.

Merlin was able to pin down the scientific basis for these powers: Zero Point Energy manipulation, or energy drawn from warping other dimensions; an incredible innate biological ability to replicate - albeit on a microscopically smaller scale - a process similar to that used in the subspace energy cells that powered all the greatest works of Alteran technological genius.

This 'magic' enabled its practitioners - _homo sapiens magi, _to use modern Earth scientific terms - to literally 'pull' energy out of these dimensions and twist it to their intentions mentally, whether that be to create or, unfortunately, to destroy. Merlin and his apprentices agreed to hide the truth of their origins, believing it to be too much for the still backward, superstitious population of Earth to handle. However, these powers were now being unlocked with increasing frequency by a tiny but noticeable percentage of humanity, and as such they needed to be guided and taught, less they destroy their entire race or planet.

And so by the time 'Merlin' vanished into legend and myth, Hogwarts School had been founded by his students; the truth of their powers' origins was concealed in a Chamber beneath the Castle, constructed by one of the four apprentices and guarded by a fearsome, near-immortal sentient reptile called a Basilisk; the simple rumour of which should be enough to keep most people's curiosity in check.

It was intended that, once a sufficient state of advancement had been attained by humanity, then the Chamber would be easily accessed, the Basilisk - which was sentient enough to understand _not _to indiscriminately kill intruders, and only try to scare them off - could be communicated with and persuaded to stand down, and some subtle biometric scans would determine if the subject possessed the required Alteran DNA heritage. The actual contents of the chamber were hidden 'out-of-phase' with reality, shifted into an alternate dimension. Once the ATA test was passed, and the subject had taken a few simple tests to confirm understanding of mathematics, geometry and other basic scientific principles, the contents - in particular, a complete database of Alteran knowledge and various other devices - would be shifted back.

It is worth noting that Merlin discovered that not all so-called wizards and witches possessed what is referred to now by the Asgard as the Alteran Technology Activation gene, i.e. a particular gene present in their entire population that was chosen by the Alterans to function as a biometric security check. The 'powers' passed on by the Alterans' descendants were, in fact, rooted in other genetic sequences.

While there _was_ a statistically noticeable relationship between magical abilities and the ATA marker, its incidence was not massively higher than in the non-magical population: while the ATA occurred in roughly two per cent of the 'normals', it appeared in about fifteen per cent of the 'magicals'; despite this, due to the disparity in population size between the two societies by the 20th Century, even non-magical ATA gene holders significantly outnumbered magical ones.

Thus, when one Thomas Marvolo Riddle broke the defences on the Chamber of Secrets, he found nothing but a complex of empty rooms because he did not have the ATA gene – but he also found an ancient basilisk that had been literally bored to insanity by a thousand years of absolutely nothing happening.

If he'd been around, Salazar would have agreed that part of the defences probably wasn't his brightest idea. But back to the history.

For many centuries, Hogwarts was the sole magical educational institution and continued to grow larger in order to accommodate the educational needs of the increasing world magical population, but eventually even the proportionately very small wizarding population became sufficiently large and dispersed to need more schools. Hogwarts was reduced to only teaching those from the British Isles - and by the time this occurred, the world's magical societies had isolated themselves from the rest of humanity's prejudice under the Statue of Secrecy.

Unfortunately, due to the wide extent of the research already undertaken by Merlin and those now known as the Founders, very little further development was required for anything other than exceptional circumstances. Thus, the magical world slowly began to stagnate under the Statute; secure in the belief that they were superior to and safe from the barbaric 'Muggles' anyway, further magical research while of course desirable was hardly required. Thus, much of the knowledge that the revered Founders had originally taught was lost to apathy and ignorance; ignorance that gave rise to the aforementioned T. M. Riddle.

Riddle was, essentially, a successful opportunist; a highly intelligent and extremely ambitious opportunist who also happened, unfortunately for both his followers and enemies, to be a psychotic megalomaniac of the highest order. By the time of Riddle's rise in the mid-to-late 1970s, much of the 'Established' Wizarding nations – primarily Britain, Northern Germany, the Baltic and Scandinavian nations and what in the Muggle world would be called 'The Soviet Bloc' regions – were heavily conservative, with governmental systems, laws and social customs that strongly favoured the 'Old Guard' pure-blooded magical aristocracy.

Newer magical governments, such as in the Americas and Australasia (both of whom had been on the receiving end of less-than-enlightened policies from their erstwhile homelands), and those with more diverse populations, (such as France, Belgium, the rest of Southern Europe and most of Africa, all of which featured higher proportions of non-human 'magical' sentient species), tended to be more liberal. The non-human magicals had evolved from various sources; mostly from 'failed' Goa'uld experiments on human slaves to create even stronger, more adaptable hosts, or were imported from offworld although when they gained access to their curious and often highly specialised 'magical' abilities is as-yet unknown. It should be considered fortunate that Ra lost control of Earth before the energy-manipulation talents in homo magi became obvious, or the Goa'uld with them as hosts would have been unstoppable.

Riddle, however, did not live in these better-governed regions. He lived in Britain, where he saw an opportunity – surprise, surprise – to rise to dominance by leading the strong pureblood faction there. Riddle himself was not a pureblood, but was able to hide this fact by adopting a pseudonym - Lord Voldemort. He began his rampage, however, not as a psychotic murderer but as an effective politician, a charismatic and effective leader who charmed his way through the upper echelons of pureblood society until he had their absolute loyalty. However, Riddle's brutal childhood in a wartime non-magical orphanage had led both to high-functioning sociopathy and all-consuming hatred of those he considered inferior, which later rose to the surface more and more prominently. He became prone to inflicting pain and occasional death on even his closest subordinates; what he did to his enemies was the stuff of nightmares.

Riddle's five-year reign of terror was cut short on 31st October 1981, when he targeted the Potter family. It is not yet known why he went alone that night, or indeed exactly what happened. What is known is that the Potter adults, Lily and James, were murdered, and their son Harry survived, while 'Voldemort' did not. The rest of Magical England celebrated.

For his safety, fifteen month-old Harry was secretly placed with non-magical relatives on his mother's side, his Aunt Petunia and her husband Vernon Dursley. From their extremely narrow-minded point of view, they had been saddled with supporting a child they did not want, who possessed abilities both of them were intensely jealous of; this attitude bled over into their treatment of their nephew, as they tried to 'beat it out of him.'

The abuse was systematic, beginning the day Harry arrived, and only became more savage as he grew up. The early years of under-nourishment and emotional neglect gave way to verbal abuse, physical beatings and forced labour. Even social workers who deal exclusively with such cases wouldn't even have nightmares about abuse this horrific; all this, directed at a child still at an age in single figures. His parent's behaviour encouraged Dudley to do the same, continuing Harry's abuse and social isolation even at school and away from the adult Dursleys.

From a neutral point of view, Dudley was a victim as well. A child's mind is malleable, vulnerable to the influence and viewpoints of his or her adult protectors; encouraging one in such behaviour pretty much guaranteed Dudley would have little to no chance of fitting into society as an adult. Similarly, Harry would have his psyche scarred by this childhood abuse, albeit in different ways.

Evil is a hard thing to define, but anyone with even a shred of morality should have recognised that Harry's life, from his parent's murder to the present day, had had more than his fair share, and his relatives treatment of him was most certainly evil. Unfortunately, in pursuit of presenting a perfectly 'normal' face to the world the Dursleys became exceptionally accomplished at hiding their own abnormality; while some residents of Little Whinging may have suspected something was wrong, they either vastly underestimated the true depths of their neighbour's depravity and cruelty, or were simply apathetic. In either case, they decided it was 'none of their business', and nothing was done.

'The present day' was a week before Harry's eleventh birthday. Harry had cooked breakfast for the Dursley's as usual, and was quietly waiting for them to finish so he could get the scraps. He no longer thought of it as 'stealing', as Aunt Petunia always screeched if she caught him – despite knowing no other childhood, and having no friends close enough to ask how life was for them, soon-to-turn eleven Harry knew his life was not normal, no matter how hard the Dursley's pretended he deserved it.

"Go get the post boy," his Uncle Vernon ordered absentmindedly, scanning the paper. Harry went with alacrity; any time spent away from Vernon vastly decreased the likelihood of being smacked around.

There wasn't much. Postcard from his uncle's sister Marge, a few bills and …

A stiff, heavy envelope … addressed to him.

_Can't be for me. I don't get mail._ Harry read the address again.

_Yep. For me._ Even though he had never received post before, Harry knew that this unprecedented event would not be simply accepted by his relatives without comment - more probably a beating. He hid the letter in his 'bedroom' as he passed it on the way back to the kitchen.

A few minutes later, Harry was pushed back into his cupboard – hard – with a handful of scraps from his 'Aunt.' He finished them off before turning his attention to the letter.

It was sealed with red wax, which Harry carefully broke before …

A flash of white light showed around the doorjamb.

* * *

Loki had been searching for someone like this for decades.

An Asgard geneticist of some considerable repute, Loki was not much to look at. Asgard generally weren't, these days. About a metre high, with grey pallid skin, stick-thin limbs and disproportionately large bulbous heads and eyes, the Asgard of today were a far cry from their ancestors of thirty thousand or more years before.

In pursuit of means of extending their lifespans, the Asgard had turned to cloning, and through their advanced technology developed a way of downloading an individual's personality and knowledge from one body to another; this made each Asgard functionally immortal, but at the cost of continued evolution. Over time, it became apparent that excessive cloning was degrading their species' genome, and they had lost the ability to procreate biologically; a long-term issue as critical as the Replicators, as it was as sure to result in their extinction - just more insidiously.

Loki was one of the scientists assigned to the problem, free to take his research in any direction he deemed fit - within reason. However, what he had been doing for many years would not be regarded by the High Council as in any way ethical. He believed that the secret to resolving the issue lay in studying any Alteran DNA he could find; the Alterans had been hyper-advanced in genetics and biosciences, and had successfully fiddled around with their own genome to induce the gradual evolution of their intriguing powers of touch healing and telekinesis.

Loki had, almost a century before, been made aware of the existence of the 'second evolution'; it was no secret that the Council was interested in the development of the Milky Way's 'human' race, but it was not widely known that they were related to the Alterans. He had studied humans from orbit for decades, restrained by the High Council's protective attitude towards the planet before eventually deciding he needed more accurate data.

He started abducting people; covertly, so as not to draw the Council's attention. While capable of distinguishing between, say, Jaffa or Human lifesigns, even Asgard technology could not discern someone's DNA from orbit so he was forced to start pretty much at random, beginning on the 'Western' continent near where the Stargate was housed in storage. Loki had time on his side, as the genetic issue was a very long-term one, so slowly and patiently he built up a picture – the humans own discovery of DNA sped that up. Eventually, Loki became aware of 'magicals.'

They were well hidden. As a biosciences ship, Loki's vessel did not have an extensive sensor suite – just the bare minimum to get by, unlike warships or dedicated survey ships – and relied on physically beaming samples aboard for examination; Loki was often so focused on his research he didn't pay much attention to the sensor data anyway. Thus, it took him a long time to find those he searched for; those he believed to be the 'true' Alteran descendants were concealed behind subspace-energy fields created to hide from the other, power-less humans on Earth.

However, he quickly discovered they weren't remotely as closely related genetically to the Alterans as he hoped, so he remained in orbit, picking up subjects from the various wizarding cultures whenever he could – something their teleportation made rather difficult, as they rarely ventured outside their secure areas for long. Most frequently, he detected subspace emissions being exhibited by children in unshielded homes, but despite his 'ends justify the means' attitude, even Loki drew the line at kidnapping children - usually.

Now he had crossed that line. The child in question had exhibited near-constant low-level subspace emissions for years now, very unlike the others which usually only gave out occasional bursts, and had demonstrated teleportation capabilities at an age a full ten years before any other he had observed.

Loki was growing desperate for results, as the Council had been asking some pointed questions of late concerning his exact whereabouts. With advanced communications technology, being in a different galaxy was not an issue, and as long as he reported in and completed the other projects assigned to him his prolonged absences from the Ida Galaxy would not be noted, or his exact whereabouts tracked. However, Loki now believed the High Council was suspicious; his rather forthright opinions on how to fix the cloning issues using humans were not secret, after all, but he believed his actions to be for the greater good of all Asgard, and should he find a cure then all would be forgiven, if not necessarily forgotten.

Loki's initial scan proved the wait had been worth it; the black-haired ten year old human had more Alteran genetic markers in his DNA than any other subject to date. He decided to keep the child around for further tests, and immediately initiated growing a clone of his new research subject, copying the boy's mind and memories into the body. The process would take slightly more than a week, and while he would normally return the subject none-the-wiser for the interim, he didn't want to take the risk of being unable to retrieve him should the Council come for him.

_That means I will have to implant false memories to cover the period when the child is 'missing,' something simple but convincing. Complicated implanted memories tend to break down if the subject was faced with proof of their false nature._

The next few days saw Loki alternate his attentions between perfecting the clone, and the actual subject himself. The child was not at the right stage of development for his study, so Loki induced accelerated growth through injection of programmed nanites, and delivered some material to keep his new ship-guest occupied; Loki might be a kidnapper, but didn't consider himself cruel, even if the 'cruelty' was through simple boredom.

Just a few hours before the clone's growth was completed, however, the ship's sensors detected another Asgard vessel approaching the system in hyperspace. With only a few seconds warning, Loki was forced to flee from orbit without beaming the clone back to the planet.

* * *

It had been a surreal a few days for Harry. He had been kept in a wide room with smooth metal walls – and no door. Periodically a white light would flash accompanied by a musical tone and food, clothing, books or some other form of occupying his time would appear.

That wasn't the really odd part, however. Two other things stood out – first, the wall that was a window. Taking up the entire surface, it looked out onto a view of what Harry recognised immediately from books as Earth from space, with vast expanses of blue ocean and broad bands of swirling clouds. The night-day cycle allowed him to get a reasonable guess at how long he'd been here. He wasn't sure if it was some kind of awesomely realistic image or the real thing though.

The other was that whenever he went to sleep his body seemed to change. Several times, he fell asleep even when he wasn't actually trying to, only to awake in an awkward position on the floor, leaving him feeling unsure of his guess as to how long he had been up here. His hair was longer, and he thought he was growing taller faster than he should too – certainly, the roughly half-metre high platform the food appeared on seemed gradually getting lower; he wasn't sure until he compared the clothing he was wearing to the next pile of replacements that appeared - they were definitely bigger.

He busied himself with the books. They were mostly scientific in nature, textbooks geared towards teenagers. Harry didn't mind the academic bent; in fact, he was glad for it. He was never allowed to excel at school; when he'd brought home a particularly good school report, hoping to win some small sign of approval from his guardians – to prove that he wasn't the worthless child they always said he was – he was beaten for several minutes simply because the report had been better than Dudley's, before being thrown in his cupboard bruised black and blue in areas that Vernon knew wouldn't show at school. That had been a turning point, when he realised that there was no way his adult guardians could be treating him 'normally' - whatever normal was anyway.

After an undetermined amount of time, the ship suddenly jerked. Harry didn't feel it, but he saw it – the view of Earth suddenly tilted out of frame, with the window now pointing out towards the starfield, where he saw something even more incredible than the view of the planet.

An opaque purple-blue cloud blossomed out of the nothingness of space, growing larger and larger until a massive object decelerated out of the cloud, which dispersed into vanishing wisps behind it. It was a long, flat oblong, with a wider T-shape at the nearer end and a broad curving shape at the far end with two vertical spines emerging from that curved section.

Harry's brain kicked back into gear as he realised that if – as he believed – the view of Earth had been real, and he had actually been on some kind of space ship, then this was also one. The view of this fantastic new sight was cut off just as suddenly as it appeared. The starfield and the new ship vanished, replaced by a swirling blue-black kaleidoscope. Another blink, and shift of perspective, and Harry realised this was a tube, and he – well, whatever he was in – was travelling through it.

* * *

In a castle in Scotland, a silver spell monitoring device screeched in protest at the sudden increase in distance between itself and the spell it was anchored to. The odd-looking artefact (which for some arcane reason resembled a steam-puffing windmill rotor tilted at a forty-five degree angle), attempted to draw more power from the subspace energy-rich environment around it to compensate, but it was not designed to handle the kind of energy requirements to track something now several hundred lightyears away.

"Oh, bugger," said the device's owner, who quickly ducked.

With a suitable sense of dramatic timing, the spell monitor exploded, completely wrecking the shelf of similar devices it rested upon.

"Well, I suppose that's one way to answer your Hogwart's letter, Harry," muttered the current headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore.

While many of the random curios that decorated his office were there simply to make ill-informed visitors think he was off his rocker - it was always useful to be underestimated - that particular one monitored, or more accurately _had_ monitored the health and general location of the 'Boy-Who-Lived'. Dumbledore wasn't going to jump to conclusions - if Harry had died, the device would have simply stopped spinning. The explosion meant the spell itself had gone awry, which was unfortunate but did not necessarily indicate a life-threatening situation. However, it did of course need to be followed up on.

_I've been too damn busy to check on him for ten years … and I owed Lily and James far more effort than that, not to mention what we all owe to Harry himself. I suppose giving him his letter in person would be an easy way to check on him. I can reassemble the tracker and determine what went wrong with it later._

With that decision, the Headmaster summoned a house elf to retrieve one of the spare letters from his deputy's office while he created a Portkey from a random piece of parchment. The elf was back in just a few seconds, and Dumbledore vanished to reappear in a secluded side alley near Number Four, Privet Drive. What he found in the Dursley's memories and in the cupboard under the stairs made him so angry it triggered his first outburst of accidental magic in more than a century.

* * *

With no Earth to be his reference, Harry was not sure how long the ship he was on stayed doing whatever it was doing now, or where it was. However, judging now from how many meals were delivered, it had been at least a week or more, but the mysterious changes continued, messing with his estimate again.

Suddenly, as he was pondering this, the view out of the window switched back to a vast sweep of stars. Several ships similar to the one he had caught a glimpse of before leaving Earth hovered in the void, forming a semi-sphere around the one he was captive aboard.

Although he was not allowed to watch any of Dudley's science fiction shows, Harry had heard it from his cupboard and knew the general gist of it, so he was fervently hoping the newcomers didn't blow his transport away before rescuing him.

It took several minutes, but eventually, the musical chime-flash of light thing happened again, and after a brief moment of disorientation, Harry realised he was … somewhere else.

'Somewhere else' turned out to be a wide, high room designed in a similar style to his previous accommodations. The walls and floor were the same smooth blue-grey metal, polished to a fine sheen. One wall had a window, and the others had screens displaying some strange text he didn't understand.

All this Harry took in before realising that there was a … something - or someone - in this room with him. Seated behind some sort of desk a few metres away, a grey-skinned, black-eyed and distinctly not-human individual looked at him unblinkingly.

Harry gaped.

"Greetings, Harry Potter," the alien - and it was pretty clearly an alien - said in a monotone.

"How -" Harry began, but stuttered somewhat, surprised by the new, deeper pitch of his voice. Apparently his height wasn't the only thing that had changed.

"What has happened to me, and how long has it been? How do you know my name? Where am I? Who are you? And what are … you?" Harry trailed off. "Sorry, that was rather rude of me."

"I do not take offence at your questions, Harry Potter. To answer them in no specific order, my name is Thor, Supreme Commander of the Asgard Fleet, and you are aboard my flagship, the _Beliskner._ The Asgard are a race from the Ida Galaxy, and I know your name from a short, ongoing analysis of the computers in the ship that kidnapped you from your homeworld for the past six weeks. Your kidnapper is also an Asgard, a scientist by the name of Loki, and he will face the full weight of our people's justice for his unethical actions. And finally, from those same computers, Loki appears to have deliberately accelerated your ageing. I am still waiting to find out why."

Harry processed this for a few seconds. "Can you, I don't know, de-age me and send me home?"

"I am afraid that is not advisable. Your biological development is now equivalent to a seventeen year old male human; this would be noticed." Thor broke off for a moment, focusing on the panel in front of him.

"This is unexpected."

"What is?"

"Long ago, the Asgard were allied to another race, who called themselves the Alterans. Loki kidnapped you because he believed you were descended from them. His tests appear to prove the theory. Interesting. However, I would like to check myself."

There was a white flash of light, and a short, white column appeared in front of Harry.

"Please place your hand on the scanner. It will only take a moment."

Completely overwhelmed and confused by … well, everything, Harry stepped forward without thinking about it, then hesitated. "How do I know this isn't a trick? How do I know you aren't Loki, whoever he is, or that this is something … I don't know, something not good for me?"

"You do not, Harry Potter. Loki did not see the need to interact with you in any way, so you only have my word that I am not he. However, I will point out that I have revealed myself, and have not harmed you in any way."

Harry stared at Thor for a few seconds. It was obvious that Thor could do whatever he pleased to Harry, so he might as well cooperate. He stepped forward again and placed his hand on the rounded top of the pillar.

"Excellent." Thor studied his screen for a few seconds. "You are indeed descended from the Alterans. A very close descendant, indeed. This is both unexpected and possibly very helpful."

"What, exactly does that mean?"

"It means that, in comparison to most humans, a much larger proportion of the dominant genetic sequences in your cells' nucleic chromosome sequence structures can be traced to the interaction of the Alterans and humans of roughly ten thousand years ago." _That didn't make any more sense_.

"Umm," said Harry cautiously, "I didn't understand that. Please could you explain a bit more, sir?"

"Of course. And just Thor is perfectly acceptable, Harry Potter."

"Then just call me Harry, please. It sounds a bit odd with both names."

"Of course, Harry." Thor paused for a few seconds, organising his thoughts. "A million years ago ..."

* * *

The explanation of the history of the Alterans took several hours, in which time Thor eventually produced - 'transported', Harry was told - a seat for him. Several hours of listening to the Asgard's soporific monotone was only just counteracted by the sheer unbelievable-ness of the information being conveyed. Harry had no choice but to believe, however; he was sitting with an alien on a spaceship many lightyears from Earth, which kind of proved the whole thing without needing any tests beyond pinching himself a few times … which didn't wake him up.

"Okay." Harry sat back, and considered the lengthy lecture he'd just received. "I'm the last descendant of, or perhaps the first discovered 'true' member of a new generation of an old ally of your people."

"That is essentially correct."

"This is all very interesting, but what does it mean for me?"

"I can offer you several choices, Harry. First of all, while I can of course return you to Earth, I cannot reverse the changes Loki has made to your physiology. You have been missing several weeks, as well. Combined, those two factors will draw significant attention. Given the level of paranoia Earth governments have exhibited towards unknown, inexplicable events like your return would appear to be, I doubt they would leave you in peace."

"Okay." Harry repeated. "The other choices?"

"Second, I can leave you in the care of a friendly advanced race, probably the Tollans, or possibly the Nox. They are all races in this galaxy we have had contact with in the past, and they are technologically advanced and peaceful. They would not infringe your rights as an individual, as I fear your own government would. Finally, you could opt to remain with the Asgard. Given Loki's actions, I can understand if you do not trust us, but we can offer you an extremely advanced education which will give you even more options in the future."

Seeing Harry hesitate, Thor continued. "Of course, you should not make a hasty decision. The console over there contains further information about those races and the galaxy as a whole, in English, that will help you make a more informed decision. I will also answer any further questions you have."

* * *

Harry might only have been ten … now eleven years old, but he understood he was at a critical crossroads in his life. Thor's opinion on returning to Earth was clear; Harry could understand his point, and had no wish to become a lab rat.

From the data on the terminal, Harry had a basic understanding of the cultures of both the Nox, Tollan, Hebridians and more importantly, the Goa'uld. While he could respect the integrity of the non-aggression stance the Nox and Tollan had held rigidly to for several millennia, he found he could not accept the same himself.

In his eleven year old's immature, but not inaccurate comparison, the Goa'uld were bullies that needed to be stopped. Given their near-total domination of much the Milky Way, that would require force. His own home, Earth, was powerless to do anything, not sufficiently advanced to even be aware of the threat let alone resist it. The Nox would not do anything, nor would the Tollans, and the Hebridians weren't advanced enough and relied on secrecy to avoid Goa'uld attention. Thor had explained why the Asgard were unable to themselves …

Here, Harry realised, he had a choice. He could hide with the pacifists, or he could stand up to the bullies. The seed of an idea took root, unformed and barely articulated even in his own mind. Maybe, just maybe … he could do something about the Goa'uld himself. He'd always _wanted_ to stop Dudley from bullying both him and others, wanted it so very badly. And if what Thor was hinting at was correct ... he was in a potentially unique position.

Even for an eleven year old, albeit one with an as-yet-undiagnosed case of Chronic Hero Syndrome, the choice between doing what was right and what was easy was clear.

Of course, if he took that route he would need all the help he could get. The best of all four Great Races, if possible; especially the Asgard, since they were making the offer. He turned back to Thor, who had been working in the background on a different console.

"Before I make a decision," Harry began, "what would _you_ suggest?"

Thor tilted his head to one side, regarding Harry intently. "I do not wish to influence your decision in any particular direction, Harry. It is not my place."

"I know, but while the information you have shown me is helpful, I don't really have any understanding of what is possible for me? As an Alteran, I mean. You seem to think it is a big deal, and I can see why you would; but I don't really understand what or how high I, myself, should be aiming for even with all the stuff you've told me."

"I see." Thor paused for a few seconds again. "As an Alteran, you have the ability to utilise many pieces of technology that border on the miraculous. While the Asgard have had partial access to some of the databases of knowledge your ancestors left behind, I cannot emphasise how much we do not yet understand; we have barely scratched the surface despite several thousand years of study. With access to a full, undamaged Ancient Repository - admittedly, something we do not have - your knowledge of these things would essentially become instinctive, and if combined with understanding of Asgard science you would be possibly the most knowledgeable single individual in existence. From there," Thor shrugged, or at least Harry thought it was the Asgard equivalent. "From there, anything would be possible."

"In that case," Harry said resolutely, "I've decided."

* * *

Five Years Later ...

Harry was now a vastly different individual to the eleven-going-on-sixteen year old Thor had rescued. For one, the Asgard High Council had approved of Thor's request he be brought up to Asgard standards as quickly as possible, and liberal use of time-dilation to accelerate his education meant his biological and chronological ages were vastly different - and that was without taking into account the gene therapy Hemidall had designed that had messed with his ageing even more to counteract Loki's tinkering.

In linear time, Harry was still only fifteen. Biologically, he looked around eighteen. Chronologically, Harry had actually experienced ten years, making him twenty-one; ten years dedicated to intense academic study and military training, as well as extensive travel to various safe worlds in the Milky Way. Somewhat strangely, he had come to view the Supreme Commander as a kinda-sorta surrogate father, an position Thor fell into without immediately noticing. He appeared to view Harry's training and development as a key personal project, but also encouraged him to visit non-Asgard cultures regularly, acknowledging that most Asgard were far too cerebral to provide the _social_ education and interaction Harry also required.

To that end, Harry hitched along with the most recent of Thor's occasional whistle-stop tours of the Protected Worlds, and had spent the last two years amongst the Tollans, the Nox, the Serrakin, and various other more undeveloped cultures. He had also had limited contact with the Tok'Ra, but their requirements for security meant he had only met one member of the paranoid group on an uncharted world for a few weeks to learn about their overall strategy and espionage-sabotage tactics.

The seed of the idea that had appeared when Thor made his offer all those years ago had germinated, flourished and grown ever clearer.

Harry had studied Earth in detail; although he had been unable to visit his home planet, Thor's enormously advanced Asgard computers had copied pretty much the entire contents of Earth's information networks, both open and encrypted, for later analysis even as he blew past in pursuit of Loki. This study covered many aspects of his homeworld's various cultures, but had most often focused on Earth's diverse political and military history, and although the Asgard no longer required ground combat in war, Harry had analysed, discussed, deconstructed and adapted Earth's often extremely inventive methods of strategy, diplomacy, espionage, leadership and, of course, warfare with various learned members of the Asgard military when they had the time. Although most of it was outside their usual remit of space-based combat, they often found the ideas he put forward thought-provoking enough to eventually endorse his plan to the Council.

Eventually, he had assembled his ideas for defeating the Goa'uld into an ambitious long-term plan, combining Earth military tactics, Tok'Ra strategy and covert application of Asgard technological superiority that the High Council had agreed to - with a few constraints.

First - that the System Lords not discover any evidence of Asgard involvement. The fleet was too over-stretched as it was, and lacked the strategic reserves to defend the Protected Planets if the Goa'uld were to attack all of them at once - which they would most assuredly do if any evidence of Asgard involvement in the Milky Way outside the stipulations of the Treaty was detected.

Second - that he be entirely self-sufficient. The Council chose to trust in Thor's assertions that Harry was now sufficiently well-trained to operate independently and without much oversight; however, they would be unable to dedicate anything more than token resources to assist, and he could forget about any real military support. Harry was fine with that. He was well aware of the precarious strategic situation of the Asgard, but the Replicators weren't his fight; the Goa'uld were, as they were a threat to his home. He still regarded Earth as home, despite not being back there in five years (objectively speaking). The High Council had acceded to his passionate and logical arguments - after all, they as well were all too familiar with being under such a threat. They would provide the 'startup' infrastructure, and trust in his judgement.

Thus, it became something of a weird desert island training scenario on a galactic scale for Harry - get dropped off on a planet with some tools, and complete the objective. Except that it wasn't training any more, the tools were rather advanced - a power source, a database and a few multi-function construction/mining drones as well as a molecular fabricator - and the objective was the defeat and/or eradication of the dominant race of megalomaniacal, narcissistic galactic overlords.

Yeah … that was going to take a while.

And he wanted some more personal answers; answers he could find only on Earth, answers to questions he had had to put aside since Thor rescued him. Questions mostly engendered by a curious envelope Thor had discovered on Loki's ship, an envelope that had been in Harry's hand when he had been kidnapped.

What on Earth - pun intended - was 'Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,' and what did they know about powers like his?

* * *

And there it is! In the interests of getting this out sometime this century, I'm cutting it off before it really gets anywhere. However, those of you who have read the experimental chapters I put up a few months back have some idea of where I'm going with this - stick with me please, I'm only just getting going!

And please review. Lifeblood of fanfic writers and all that.


	2. Arc 1, Chapter 2 - Small Events

**Disclaimer**: I don't own anything.

A/N 1: I do apologise for my very long absence from this story - in my defence, everyone seems to be enjoying the others very much too. If you haven't, check out '**Per Ardua ad Astra**', its prequel 'Per Ardua ad Astra - The Making of a Warrior' and the parallel universe story (NCIS Crossover) '**Khaveyrim**.' They are, of course, all _awesome!_

Self-publicity over.

The first draft - the very long first draft - of this chapter was _terrible_. It was basically one very, very long infodump. When I got around to rereading it I discovered that I found my _own story _terminally boring. That was clearly not good enough, so I deleted nearly fifteen thousand words and started from scratch.

In pursuit of making it better, I've time skipped quite a bit of stuff. Military/covert ops require vast amounts of preparation to accomplish properly, and setting up major campaigns - even one-man ones - require even more, I would imagine. So I skipped all the 'infrastructure' stuff - setting up a base, resource gathering, ship designing and other stuff (basically, I wrote an RTS game, and concentrated on the boring parts. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't very interesting!) was was previously 'in' and jumped to the first stage of the action.

Also, a _reminder_, since it's been a long wait. **_STARGATE DATES HAVE BEEN CHANGED 10 years forward for this AU!_**

Brian Blessed impression now over.

A/N 2: I'm using normal Stargate terminology for the various bits of applied phlebotinum: invented elements, minerals and technology used on the show, even if the SGC obviously hasn't yet named the things themselves, since they don't exist in the storyline yet. This is mostly so I don't confuse myself, let alone you guys who aren't privy to my leaky memory and meandering thought proce-s-s … where was I again? Oh, right …

One last thing; I'm no scientist, so I've probably hideously mutilated the laws of physics repeatedly in this. It's Stargate, and Wikipedia's my only source. Don't expect Nobel-Prize-Winning accuracy here. Hell, even Stargate's science-y bits contradict themselves, and most of that's _made up!_

* * *

**Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum **

'_If You Wish for Peace, Prepare for War'_

**Act One - Preparation Begins**

* * *

Great events don't happen instantly.

A widely populated galaxy is a chaotic place. While instant communications are available, they are expensive and reserved for high-priority messages, and only for use by the most influential individuals.

In the Milky Way, this means the System Lords by default, along with their immediate underlings and strategic-level military assets; fleets, armies, capital ships.

However, the rest of the galaxy operates on a principle of rumour and courier-vessel delivered messages. This has functioned adequately to date, and is easier for the System Lords to censor and surveil.

However, it does tend to mean that small events are … lost in the chatter, so to speak.

And small events can snowball. They grow, multiply, and become an unstoppable tide.

And if those in charge are too blinkered, arrogant and assured of their race's unassailable position of power … well, they may well not notice the 'tide' until it is far, far too late.

Now … let's think, _really_ hard … who does _that_ describe?

* * *

**Chapter Two - Small Events**

_"Getting the operational plan properly worked out by reconnaissance in advance is crucial to the subsequent success of any operation."_

_Bob Stewart_

* * *

_July 31__st__, 1995_

Chulak was one of the old worlds, established when the Goa'uld first moved humans off Earth. It had been Apophis' combined homeworld, capital world (not necessarily the same thing), central military depot and trade nexus for that entire time, throughout his rise from a minor fleet commander in service to Ra to being a System Lord in his own right.

As such, it had always been fiercely defended, on land or on space. With a total planetary garrison of nearly fifty thousand Jaffa and with a dozen battleships on duty in orbit, attacking Chulak through _just_ the Stargate was a suicidal proposition. To do so would be to ignite a combined response of orbital fire, ground troops and bombing from Death Gliders and Al'kesh. Despite this known and assured security, the Jaffa Ha'tak crews remained alert with all the thoroughness and dedication their race was known for, even though nothing had happened on this picket for thousands of years.

They still didn't see their unknown enemy's arrival. Or his exit, for that matter.

Chulak was a binary star - the planet orbited around Chulak-A, and the dwarf star Chulak-B orbited -A at a distance of almost twelve light minutes. An oddity of orbital mechanics meant that they orbited at roughly similar rates, so -B was always on the far side of -A from the planet. Nonetheless, the two stars' combined radiation ensured Chulak's climate was one of daily extremes - hot days, cool nights.

Thus, when a small purple hyperspace window opened behind Chulak-B, the radiation output as well as the sheer distance hid it from the probing sensors of the guard fleet.

But … nothing emerged from the hyperspace window.

Or at least … nothing _appeared_ to emerge from it.

* * *

Twelve hours later, a Jaffa patrol stomped back up the road leading away from the Stargate.

The ground troops were however, unlike their shipborne counterparts, considerably less attentive. For the ship crews, standing watch over Chulak was relatively new - the fleet here formed a major component of Apophis' strategic reserves, and thus ships were often dispatched on special missions, or to reinforce other sectors, and were thus rotated through various assignments often enough to keep things relatively interesting.

The ground troops, however, had been deployed here for years, and in some cases - given a Jaffa's long lifetime - decades. This was not a bad thing from their point of view; with such steady duty, many of their families had moved to live with them, or they had found wives and settled down.

However, inaction breeds lethargy. And lethargy leads to mistakes.

So although the Jaffa on the ground performed their duties with the mechanical thoroughness they always did, like any troops assigned to monotonous duty - even 'elite' troops - they had slackened off on the _little_ details. A squad was always on sentry duty around the 'Gate on four hour shifts. As such, a relief squad walked this road and back six times a day.

Every day.

For years.

And nothing had _ever_ happened.

They no longer _expected_ anything to happen, no longer believed anything _would _happen_. _

A figure - more of a indistinct silhouette, really - darted across the road behind the patrol as they passed out of sight up the track. Patrol doctrine would have called for point and trailing teams of three or four, mostly to catch out exactly this scenario. The Jaffa on Chulak didn't bother with that any more, focusing instead to coming off duty and returning to their families.

The squad that had just replaced them had already taken the long-established sentry positions, standing in pairs - one facing in, towards the gate, and the other outwards, to watch for people - spies, in particular - who might try to break through the perimeter and escape via the Stargate. The ground under their feet was worn bare by the continual presence of guards standing sentry in those exact positions, chosen decades if not centuries ago as the most suitable watch-posts.

The infiltrator had already mapped their positions and sight lines, particularly the patches of dead ground they couldn't directly see, and ghosted past the guards, through small valleys and gullies towards the gate.

Fortunately for him, the shadow's mission did not require physical access to the Stargate; with the thirty metres of open ground that separated Chulak's 'Gate from the nearest available cover from view, that would have been difficult to achieve on account of the half-dozen sentries watching it. The guards were lax, but still awake. They could be knocked out, but that would defeat the point of covertly infiltrating the site; bored and inattentive they might be, but the sentries would - probably - notice if trouble quite literally knocked them over the head.

Reaching the base of a large tree, the man removed a backpack and pulled out a small flat board, which floated gently out of his hand and silently ascended into the upper branches of the tree … which just happened to overlook the gate and dialling pedestal.

The flat, flexible panel adhered to the tree trunk where it touched down, quickly taking on a reasonable facsimile of the texture and colour of the bark on its outer surface. The only part not so camouflaged was a tiny, unnoticeable camera lens, oriented to point towards the 'Gate.

The rest of the night passed without a hitch. Another camera was emplaced, facing the 'Gate clearing from the other direction, to provide both another viewpoint and a backup to the first. A relay transmitter was also put down, a featureless black box about a foot long, buried in a wild, unvisited valley on the route back to the extraction point.

It was the not the first time the arrangement had been deployed. The cameras were possessed only of a directed microwave transmitter that, while heavily encrypted and utilising a microburst transmission technique to increase security, were limited in range to five or so miles; enough to reach the subspace relay, which could send it anywhere in the galaxy.

Powered by solar and ambient thermal energy, the surveillance devices would activate on sensing the gate's power-up sequence, which began when the ring began spinning to engage the first glyph. It would record video of the transport - incoming or outgoing - and forward that video for analysis by an AI system, providing intelligence on troop movements, VIP's who might pass through, and suchlike. Naturally, if a System Lord suspected his 'Gates were under surveillance, the search for any such devices would no doubt take place on the gate and dialling pedestal themselves; being almost a hundred metres away, the camera was very unlikely to be discovered.

It wasn't the only surveillance activity going on in the system. On the way in from the hyperspace entry point behind Chulak-B, the intruder had installed a cloaked sensor suite on one of the lifeless moons of a gas giant in the outer system. Far more powerful and sensitive than the Goa'uld ships' systems, it would be able to passively detect, track and identify any ship passing through the system. The same AI system receiving the camera's images would be able to make reasonably accurate guesses at their destination from the trajectory of the hyperspace windows.

Upon reaching the pre-selected extraction point, the infiltrator performed one last check around, using his armour's built-in sensors to check there were no human life-signs or detectable surveillance within visual range … and vanished in a flash of white light.

* * *

In orbit, a small volume of … well, nothing, really, _moved._

Behind a sophisticated multi-layer bubble of subtle electromagnetic countermeasures, heat-power exchangers and holographic projectors, a sleek jet black spacecraft cut through the vacuum like the blade it resembled.

From above, its shape would be best described as similar to a leaf-shaped blade, a delta-winged shape with a central fuselage that could roughly be divided into three sections. It began as a blunt tip, broadening and deepening before narrowing again into a thinner central section, running back to the stern where it again bulged out. The forward section consisted of three decks - command and operations at the top, crew quarters and life support in the middle, and an armoury and cargo access on the lowest. The centre section was a single-level spinal access corridor, with large storage cells set into both walls and floor. The rear section was a combined engineering space - power generation and engines in one double-height deck. The wings were narrow, adding to the 'blade' impression; they were more for increasing useful internal volume than for producing lift, which was unnecessary with the use of anti-gravity systems for atmospheric flight.

It departed radically from the geometric, tetrahedral shapes favoured by the Goa'uld, and from the hammerhead designs of the Asgard. This configuration might have made the craft look ungainly, but this was not the case. This ship was all curves and sinuous lines, which suited its' purpose, and its' design philosophy.

Approximately twice the length of an Al'kesh, and with a roughly equivalent armament, the ship was optimised for stealth. It was not designed for heavy combat; surprise raids, or ambushes of lone enemy ships perhaps, when the advantages were stacked in its favour, but this craft was intended for the lonely darkness of espionage and infiltration missions, not the Wall of Battle. This ship was a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, but no less deadly for it.

It was christened the _'Raven'_ and was, at present, the only one of its kind, designed with a singular purpose in mind.

To run rings around the System Lords.

* * *

The young man who would use it for that purpose sat slumped in one of the secondary chairs in the cockpit, watching data flow across the displays. Despite his seeming inattention - one might have been forgiven for thinking him asleep - he was still absorbing it all, even as his mind followed other trains of thought; the next day's mission, or how the new data he was reading affected his longer-term plans.

It had been three months since Harry had begun this mission. In the spirit of 'victory follows preparation,' he'd had much of the groundwork prepared before leaving the Ida Galaxy. The _Raven_ had already been designed, and thus had only taken a fortnight to build with a molecular fabricator. The rest of the time had been spent hopping between major Goa'uld worlds, installing the beginnings of what would become a truly massive surveillance network.

He had now covered all the major capital worlds of the top fifteen Goa'uld, most of their shipyards, Jaffa training grounds, and trade worlds. Eventually, the objective was to cover the entire Goa'uld gate network, giving real-time, galaxy-wide intelligence on the tactical and strategic movements of the System Lords. Even without access to the most powerful Asgard technologies - 'powerful' unfortunately often being synonymous with 'obvious' - Harry still had a decided technological edge over the stagnant, overconfident parasites.

And he planned to maximise that advantage to the hilt.

A shower of multicolour pixels above the hologram emitter to one side of the screen announced the appearance of his AI helper - one of the aforementioned advantages. Given the vast amount of data already streaming in from the network - and that volume would only increase - it would be impossible for Harry to keep up with it all by himself.

Originally a fairly dumb Tollan 'Virtual Assistant,' upgraded beyond all recognition by some of the best Asgard cyberneticists and modified with a human-based personality core, 'Minerva' was the one concession to using an obviously Asgard piece of technology that the Council had made.

That had been partly due to the impossibility of doing this mission alone, but also, somewhat counter-intuitively, for security. Despite wanting to avoid any hint of their involvement, the Council had decided that an AI, particularly of Minerva's type, would not betray him or indeed be capable of such a thing; and 'she' was coded to self-destruct before discovery if so required.

Paranoid, some might say - but if the mind-stealing snake-people really _are_ out to get you, 'paranoia' rapidly becomes common sense.

Tin hats, however, are _not_ required.

Oh, and there were no Goa'uld called Minerva; Harry had checked. The parasites had been kicked off Earth well before the Roman culture started to develop. Periodically, Goa'uld _had_ returned to Earth to kidnap new cultures including, amongst many others, the Roman 9th Legion, but they had never stayed long and had thus not had much influence on ; and the last had been in the Twelfth Century. Even though there were of course connections between 'Minerva' and the Greek goddess 'Athena' - who _was_ a Goa'uld, currently in service to Cronos - Harry considered the _ideas_ behind the mythology to be more important than any peripheral connection to an enemy.

Minerva the myth was associated most with wisdom, justice, and defensive war, amongst other things - although that last one might better be interpreted as 'justified' war, as much as war ever could be such a thing. All of those things Harry considered worthy, and his selection of 'Minerva' as the AI's name was a reflection of that; the fact that the Romans borrowed heavily on the false identity of a parasitic megalomaniacal alien to construct their goddess' identity didn't devalue or taint those ideas or concepts in the slightest.

"One more mission in this stage, Harry."

Minerva took the serenely beautiful appearance of the classical depictions of the goddess she was named for, normally a flowing dress and cape but periodically including golden armour and weapons, usually whenever they were in range of enemy forces. Her long straight hair was bound by a gold circlet, matched by a gold torc necklace, the bright metal contrasting with her Mediterranean colouring; light brown skin, with eyes and hair so dark they were almost black.

The image was strikingly impressive, if however somewhat lessened in impact by the fact she was only about eight inches high on the hologram pad.

An owl occasionally appeared as well, a symbol normally associated with the goddess of wisdom and defensive war, but Harry had asked her to mute the damn thing because the hooting was pretty bloody irritating after a while.

Her clothing sometimes changed colour or styles too - when Harry had asked why, the question had elicited the rather acerbically _feminine_ response, "Just because I'm digital doesn't mean I can't dress well."

Minerva was still a 'young' AI, being about a year old. Harry had floated the idea of this mission a long time ago, all the way back when Thor rescued him. Despite this, he had been focused on his education, and the initial preparations for returning to the Milky Way had fallen to the Supreme Commander, who had, with his usual foresight, commissioned Minerva to aid Harry. Her development had taken several years, as Hermiod and Kvasir had wished to achieve their usual standards of perfection regardless of the delay. Minerva had been introduced to Harry about six months before arriving in the Milky Way, so they could start working together before getting into the thick of it.

In a human culture, the war with the rogue AI 'Replicators' would probably have resulted in a backlash against any form of research in that area. But as Thor had pointed out with typical Asgard precision, the Replicators weren't exactly an 'intelligence,' but more of an instinctual synthetic animal, simply acting on a programmed command to create more of themselves _ad infinitum_ with no thought to the consequences of that action.

Minerva was a designed, _sentient_ intelligence, with hard-coded safeguards against aberrant behaviour, and unlike the Replicators was capable of _learning_; specifically meaning a process of observing, adapting and reacting to stimuli or information rather than relentlessly following a singular purpose, as the Replicators did, to upgrade themselves and increase in number. More importantly, she was capable of understanding morals and ethical behaviour. And she had a sense of humour ... although that still needed some work. She had been explicitly designed for the purpose of this mission, being optimised for strategic and tactical analysis, but also for being a mentor and friend.

Deep space was a lonely environment at the best of times, and Harry was under a heavy burden in addition to that. Arguably the most important of Minerva's duties was to make sure he didn't crack under it.

Harry didn't take his eyes from the screen, showing a summary of shipbuilding schedules for the enormous orbital construction yards around Soma-Kesh, one of Heru'ur's most valuable territories; they had just begun a new fleet of Ha'tak battleships, ordered by Heru'ur's 'father' Ra, the Supreme System Lord.

"I know, Minerva. Also one of the most risky yet. Apophis' security is better than most."

The surveillance scheme on each target world was threefold - in space, on the 'Gate, and of the population themselves. This last one was the most risky; both in implementation and operation.

The devices used were microbots, a relatively simple application of existing technology. Harry would drop a large box containing thousands of the mosquito-type robots as well as another relay transmitter somewhere in the centre of a Goa'uld city. That night, the 'bots would fly out and do their best to locate the homes of important personages in the local power structure - low-ranking Goa'uld, Jaffa Primes, priests and so on and so forth - and find somewhere innocuous to perch, to listen and observe.

If after a few days the occupants of the house chosen seemed inconsequential, the bugs would be directed to move on. Harry had done his best to pinpoint key buildings from orbit, and the people he was interested in spying on - priests, First Primes, and so on - often marked their houses quite distinctively; it shouldn't be very hard to locate them.

Technologically, the microbots were simple but effective. Their hardware was not especially complex, and was built with technology available to any of the System Lords. They were also marked with Goa'uld symbols, usually that of the greatest rival of the owner of whichever world they were planted on, so any that were discovered would lead the System Lord being spied upon in the wrong direction. Their programming _was_ quite sophisticated, however, capable of recognising when they were near discovery and attempting to evade it; if unsuccessful, their processors would be automatically wiped, leaving no useful or identifying data.

They were programmed to look for rafters or the undersides of tables, the kind of places that were not often searched, and where they would not be easily discovered. Powered thermoelectrically by the ambient air temperature, they would remain in place, relaying what they heard to Minerva for analysis. She would notify Harry of anything interesting - tactical or strategic intelligence of course, but also any potential assets, human or Jaffa, who could be turned against the Goa'uld as moles, sleeper agents or saboteurs.

The trouble with the microbots was getting them in place. To maximise effectiveness, they had to be placed as close to a city's centre as possible, to maximise the coverage of the short-ranged transmitters in the spy-flies. That usually meant a heavily populated or frequented area, and thus using a matter transporter was out. The distinctive white flash and slight chime would be far too obvious, and would prompt investigation.

Thus, Harry had to do it personally. On foot, dressed as a follower of Apophis. It wasn't as hard as it sounded; he had 'valid' travel permits - meaning 'really good fakes' - to prove he was from another world, which excused his unfamiliarity with Chulak.

With that task done tomorrow, Harry's 'Phase One' of installing surveillance would be finished. He would leave it there for a while, partly to gather intel before his next move but also to field-test the technology and work out the kinks before starting to roll it out across other worlds; in the meantime, he intended to visit his homeworld and start looking for answers on his own history and powers.

"What do you expect to find on Earth?" Minerva asked.

"Ever curious, aren't you?"

"It is a core part of my programming," The AI responded, primly. "I wouldn't be much help as an intelligence analyst if I wasn't."

"To be honest, I don't know what to think," Harry answered her first question. "If there is a 'secret culture' as Loki believed, they will know what I am, and what I can do. Also, it lends extra importance to the defence of Earth."

"How so? Beyond the obvious, it being your homeworld, of course."

"You know the capabilities Loki observed. Defensive barriers of energy even Asgard sensors couldn't penetrate from the outside. Teleportation. Due to the first one, even Loki - who spent decades looking for and researching them - didn't know much more than that. I myself have exhibited low-level telekinesis - which is fairly reliable, if tiring - and I remember doing that teleportation trick once accidentally when I was about seven, and turning a teacher's hair blue of all things, but I haven't been able to manage either again. Can you imagine if a Goa'uld found out about these powers? About where they came from, and where they might find more hosts capable of such feats? I dread to think what Nirrti might manage with such 'test subjects.' She might well become unstoppable."

Minerva nodded, her holographic visage grave. Nirrti's continuing obsessive search for a perfect host was a major facet of her psychological profile; the horrors perpetrated on the peoples of her domain in that cause over the past few thousand years were whispered about fearfully throughout Goa'uld space.

"Not just Nirrti, but any Goa'uld. And your own history?"

Harry stood, and moved towards the rear of the cockpit, moving into the next compartment back, an operations room. Minerva materialised on the small pad next to the larger holographic table that dominated the centre of the room, currently showing a astrographic chart of the Chulak binary system, with red and amber target hacks to mark hostile and civilian craft respectively. A lone blue icon blinked in low orbit above Chulak; the _Raven _itself.

"I've had ten years to think about what little I know. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia called me a freak, that their actions would 'beat the freakishness out of me.'"

From the hologram pad, Minerva watched him stand over the desk against the port bulkhead, and look down at the faded but still legible parchment letter Harry had been holding when Loki kidnapped him. The utter dispassion of his tone when describing his relatives' treatment of him worried her, but not yet enough to bring it up.

"It's the end of July. My fifteenth birthday, actually. Kind of crept up on me."

"You work too hard."

That got a little smile. "Don't see anybody else here, Min."

The AI crossed her arms. "What am I, chopped liver?"

"You've been at the Earth databases too much."

"It's your homeworld, originally at least. I would have been remiss not to have learned …" Minerva paused, and glared. "Stop distracting me."

Harry raised an eyebrow at her. "Should I find it worrying that the AI my entire mission depends on is ... easily distracted?" He wasn't worried; Minerva's subroutines that mimicked natural conversation had no impact on the efficiency of her unseen or unheard tasks, such as -

"No, you shouldn't. I was distracted precisely _because_ I'm monitoring transmissions from all the surveillance networks already deployed, and the signal traffic around Chulak, and am simultaneously accomplishing approximately two thousand three hundred and twenty _other_ tasks."

"Okay, okay." Harry raised his hands in mock surrender. "You are the greatest, you are indispensable. Ego stroked sufficiently yet?"

"I suppose. We goddesses need a lot of ego stroking." The AI sat on a chair which appeared behind her - again, mimicking natural behaviour with commendable accuracy. She focused on Harry again, taking in his slightly nervous expression. "That was a joke."

"I hoped so. Given who, or perhaps _what _we are fighting against, would you _please_ tone down the goddess jokes?"

"Um. Good point. Anyway, I was concerned. Nearly missing your birthday is hardly a good sign, Harry. Plus, describing yourself as fifteen is just plain wrong."

Harry grinned. "I know. Going to be fun to explain to anyone on Earth who might know me, isn't it?"

"How are you going to explain a five-year absence? Or the fact you look at least twenty-one?"

"Hopefully, I won't have to. I simply don't look fifteen. Unless they're already suspicious they simply won't see Harry Potter, runaway kid; which is what I'll start using as an excuse in about five years time, once my 'age' catches up to my physical appearance. Provided I want to tell anyone at all that I _am_ Harry Potter at that point, of course."

"Why not?"

"I have no reason to think the name is well known; either as myself or for my surname. I doubt it, in fact; there is no chance a scion of a famous or wealthy family would end up with the Dursley's without _someone, _a relative or social worker or whoever checking in, surely. For all I know they _did,_ and the Dursley's managed to hide me; they managed to hide everything _else_ they did to me from even the neighbours. So no, I don't expect anyone to be looking for me, or for the name to ring bells. But if 'Harry Potter' is a missing fifteen-year old, I'd rather keep it that way. Being dead or missing is a fantastic cover."

"You want me to prepare some alternate identities?"

"Yes, that'd be good."

"Anything specific?"

"Multiple nationalities, primarily English speaking ... British, American, Canadian, Australian or New Zealander … university student would probably be the most convincing for my appearance and age."

"Understood. I'll work out the details now, and hack the relevant databases to insert the data when we reach Earth. On another topic … you said you have no idea what to expect … I doubt that."

"Oh?"

Minerva rolled her eyes. "Not to stroke _your_ ego, but you're very good at this, Harry. You must have formed _some_ sort of conclusion even with the limited amount of data available."

"I suppose." Harry leaned back against the desk. "Loki's conclusion from his observations was that this society is secretive and secluded, which I agree with, although to what degree he did not venture a hypothesis. I certainly hadn't heard of any such thing prior to my kidnapping, but given my quality of life there that isn't terribly surprising. More tellingly, there isn't even so much of a hint of even a conspiracy theory regarding these communities in the databases Thor copied, even in the ones belonging to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They're five years out of date though; that may have changed.

"From the letter, these 'wizards and witches' are clearly organised - they have a school, and an 'International Confederation of Wizards.' The British ones at least seem to have an honours system in the 'Order of Merlin, First Class,' which would suggest at least a peripheral connection to the Monarchy at some point in the past, to grant the charters for such things. This 'Albus Dumbledore' character, the school's Headmaster seems to be very attached to his various other titles as well - 'Grand Sorcerer,' 'Chief Warlock' - although what they pertain to I have no idea. No telling how much they interact with the present-day British government, either. Again, they don't appear in any official databases, even MI-5 or MI-6, but they might keep such things exclusively on paper for extra security; they've done it before."

"Anything else?" Minerva asked. Harry smiled; she did this a lot, drawing him into conversations that were basically an opportunity for him to think out loud. It was educational for both of them; for Harry, to get his thoughts in order, and for Minerva to learn _how_ he thought, to anticipate him in the future.

He turned back to the desk, spreading the yellowed parchment pages of the Hogwarts letter. "As for the rest? I'm concerned. A cloak? _Dragon_-hide gloves? And the fact they still consider their powers magic? Sure, current Earth science can't detect subspace energy, so they wouldn't be able to categorise it, but surely they've moved past the idea that _magic_ could possibly be an explanation for _anything?_ Surely they've undertaken _some_ sort of investigation into the source of their abilities, or do they just use them without thought to possible consequences? That possibility in particular worries me. It implies a … blasé attitude that hardly bodes well for any sense of … responsibility. With great power comes great responsibility, after all."

Minerva wore a satisfied little smile. "So … by you 'don't know what think' … you meant you had _actually_ put a _lot_ of thought into it?"

Harry snorted in amusement. "Yeah. Apparently without realising. Anyway, _you_ just want to meet the Deputy Headmistress."

"Who shares my name? Of course. I've no doubt she's an erudite and competent woman to the core, much like myself."

"Careful, Min. Soon there won't be enough room in the ship for your ego and _my_ air, and much as I like you, I do prefer _breathing_ to your 'erudite and competent' company."

"Fine. Be that way. See if I care." The 'goddess' stuck her tongue out in a manner distinctly at odds with her dignified appearance before vanishing, leaving Harry laughing, the weight of responsibility lifted for a precious few moments.

* * *

The next day didn't include much laughter, although it went without a hitch. Harry beamed down into the depths of the forest in the late afternoon, hiked up onto the main track, and his passport plaque got him though the outer perimeter without comment.

At the southern city gate he had to dodge a column of Jaffa along with the rest of the crowd, scattering out of the way of the marching soldiers. They were led by two of the Serpent Guard, Apophis' personal detachment and the most elite members of his Jaffa forces; Harry's current estimate put them at divisional strength - around 20,000 men. This was a mere drop in the bucket compared to Apophis' total forces of around five or six million - the innumerable detachments spread across literally hundreds of worlds of course made it impossible to be entirely accurate in those estimates. Being inducted into the Serpent Guard from the rank and file, however, required either attracting Apophis' favourable notice, or the sponsorship of a senior and distinguished Jaffa commander - usually both.

Both Serpent Guards in this patrol had their helmets retracted; one revealing a wrinkled, elderly Jaffa, his bald head covered with a metal skullcap and his tattoo of Apophis' symbol overlaid with a solid gold version of the same, but implanted into his skin. That made him Bra'tac, Apophis' long-standing First Prime of nearly fifty years and his most trusted Jaffa subordinate. It also made it likely Apophis' was in residence on Chulak himself, not that that made Harry's mission any different. He wasn't intending to risk his cover by approaching the heavily-guarded palace or attached seraglio.

Many First Primes were feared and hated by both the rank and file and the civilian populace of their masters' domains. Taking their 'God's' behaviour as an example for their own, they all too often tended towards brutality as a leadership technique. This was nothing new to those under them, and was usually accepted as a fact of life.

Bra'tac however was well-known to buck that trend, his authority stemming from his mens' respect for his experience, skill and honour on and off the battlefield rather than simple fear; that attitude had been passed onto the civilians of Apophis' domain. He was well liked on Chulak; a native son who had risen to the highest ranks of the Jaffa.

His clan was considered to be a great military family, one which had consistently provided skilled soldiers to Apophis' forces for generations, and several of his ancestors featured prominently in the oral epic tales that were a major part of Jaffa culture, much like Homer's Iliad or the Aeneid except they _had_ happened; exaggerated perhaps, but very much real and not mythical.

Furthermore, Bra'tac was often referred to as 'Master Bra'tac;' a title much like 'Sensei' or 'Sifu' on Earth in that it was used to refer to a man known to be wise and honourable, but in Jaffa society it was bestowed by the community rather than any formal structure. Using the title fatuously or to stroke a superior's ego was frowned upon, and to force subordinates to use it when the general consensus thought it undeserved could completely destroy that individual's reputation if word got out. It was, Harry thought, an important indication of Bra'tac's widespread popularity that he was referred to as such not just on his homeworld of Chulak but throughout Apophis' territory, and even in _other_ Goa'uld's domains.

The tall, dour-looking Jaffa next to Bra'tac also wore the Serpent Guard's bulky armour, but Harry didn't know much about him; the intel on Bra'tac had come from his time training with the Tok'ra operative Lantash and his host Martouf, who had made sure he knew the key players. The dark-skinned man behind the First Prime was mostly unknown. Just a name - Teal'c - and that he was Bra'tac's protégé of several years, an up and coming Second Prime.

The patrol passed, and normal traffic resumed. Harry slid out of the shadow of a column he'd managed to get behind, and merged into the flow once more.

Truth be told, he welcomed these little excursions. Of course, he could do without the, 'behind enemy lines' part, but still; Chulak was one of the oldest and grandest of Goa'uld-Jaffa worlds, and its capital city reflected that. Built almost entirely of a dusky ochre sandstone, the multi-level mountain-side metropolis of several million looked like some mythical city out of Arabian Nights - even though the elegant classical architecture showed more of a Greek influence than Egyptian or Arabian styles. It even broke the boundaries into 'beautiful,' especially when illuminated by sunrise or sunset. Indoctrinated, oppressed race the Jaffa may be, but Harry could find no hint of the ugly reality of their enslavement to the Goa'uld in their architecture.

No ... that reminder came in the form of the pyramidal ship perched on the landing platform built at high point of the hill the city was built around. Gaudy, tacky, overdone; one didn't need to know _anything_ about the Goa'uld to know whoever owned that had no taste, an enormous ego and was clearly compensating for _something_.

Harry waited for nightfall, filling the time by - subtly - playing tourist. Chulak was, to him, a symbol of what the endgame of this grand plan would be. It was a thriving city - the marketplaces were full, the spaceport was continuously active, the city itself a marvel of engineering for all that it had originally been built by hand and human muscle thousands of years ago. If the Jaffa had managed to create and maintain this place despite the oppression of the Goa'uld, with their capricious, violent nature and constant, internecine warfare, then Harry could easily believe that whatever they might achieve free of all that would surpass anything he could possibly imagine.

When the light faded, he made his way to a residential district a few streets from the main temple to Apophis and into a side alley. A quick check to make sure he was unobserved, and he was up, over the wall and into the back yard vegetable patch of an unoccupied house - he'd checked for life signs from orbit, and Minerva continued to monitor the area for him.

He removed the box, and activated it. The very slight droning buzz of the cloud of little microbots filled the air for a few seconds as a hatch opened and they flitted out, zipping away to their first targets. Then he buried the featureless black box in the very back corner of the garden - another subspace relay, as the first relay was too far away for the tiny pseudo-insects' transmitters.

The Asgard were capable of building subspace communications devices that were far smaller than the ones he was using. Unfortunately, they were also, once again, very obviously _Asgard_ in origin, and so Harry had been forced to design his own, using crystal computing technology like the Goa'uld and a liquid naquadah power source that would last a decade or so. Playing on the Goa'ulds' relentless need to tag everything they owned - even their people - the boxes, like the bugs, also had misleading icons marking them as as the property of rival System Lords.

Exfil was easier than getting in; just walk right out the main gate. For the fourth time in two days, a lonely patch of forest was lit by a white flash, and he was gone. Next stop, Earth.

* * *

_August 2nd, 1995_

Home.

Harry rolled the word around in his mind, testing it. He wasn't quite sure if he should consider Earth home anymore. He knew literally no-one on the planet; well, except his relatives and they _really_ didn't count. He'd lived as much of his life - in sidereal measurements, anyway - in a different galaxy as he had on this planet, and the eleven years he'd spent here had not been happy ones.

But … it certainly was beautiful. Harry was sitting in the pilot's chair of the _Raven_, the seat tilted back and slid to the rear, allowing for an uninterrupted view of the stunning panorama above him. The cockpit of the Raven would be more suited to a fighter jet than a deep-space ship of any kind; a sweeping window of transparent polymer so huge the pilot would actually have to twist around in his seat to see the top or back corners of it, protected by the slight blue glow of a forcefield.

Harry considered just about any view in space - even if it was just the plain, endless starfield - to be a vista beyond compare; the nearly 270-degree-horizontal by 100-degree-vertical canopy was his indulgence to that. Besides, good visibility for the pilot was never a bad thing. The Asgard scientists and officers who'd looked over the design for him had termed it a structural weakness, a massive risk if enemy fire were to make it through the shield. Harry in turn had pointed out that the _Raven_ could easily take on even multiple targets of a Tel'tak size or smaller without much risk, and if he encountered a Ha'tak, his first tactic would be to run … and if the enormous main plasma cannons of a Ha'tak _were_ to breach the shield, they'd practically vaporise the small ship anyway. One viewport wasn't going to add any exploitable weaknesses.

His recently established orbit was over the mid-Atlantic right now; there was a storm building up south of the Cape Verde Archipelago. He could clearly see the beginnings of the spiral pattern already, which probably meant it was going to be a large one. The Raven continued moving steadily up over West Africa and Europe, the timing coinciding with the sweeping line of nightfall. On the left side of the line, the world was still blue and green, interspersed with arid brown; on the other, he could trace the outlines of countries and seas by the man-made constellations of lights from cities and towns.

"Welcome home." Minerva appeared on the holopad on the pilot's station. "What's the plan?"

Harry reached out and touched a screen. The stunning image was immediately overlaid with a wraparound heads-up display, projected onto the canopy. Blue icons indicated where the sensors had picked up subspace emissions of a type similar to those observed by Loki; that incoming data had been matched against copies of Loki's sensor recordings. Solid blue indicated no change; blinking indicated a new contact. Some were flickering on for a brief few second, then turned white, before disappearing; these fleeting contacts were probably those teleporters Loki also observed, although Harry had no way to track whether or not they were arriving or departing. Yet.

"First, analysis. Can you compare what I'm seeing right now, the subspace readings, against Loki's data in relation to the fields' strength, then and now?"

"Certainly." Measurements of the subspace fields' strengths appeared next to the icons. "What are you looking for?"

"The letter doesn't say _where_ I should purchase those school supplies, but there must be a store somewhere. That means a commercial retail area, a 'magical' shopping street in other words. These 'witches and wizards' are clearly hidden from the rest of Earth, and hidden very well. Find the strongest sources in the UK, particularly in London, and rank them. Then compare the visual imagery from our sensors against the subspace readings … and for good measure, also compare it against Earth's own satellite imagery and maps."

"Done. The strongest source in the UK is actually in Scotland, in the moors a few hundred kilometres inland from Aberdeen, but there are several powerful ones in London too. The largest seems to intersect with the London streetmap on Charing Cross Road."

"What about the imagery?"

"The one in Scotland … a ruined castle. The subspace emissions form a wide symmetrical bubble around it. It almost looks like a forcefield, actually."

"Defensive?"

"Well, castles _are_ defensive installations, so that seems likely. No telling what kind of effect the field might have on the ship's systems. The Charing Cross field seems to be long and narrow in shape … and neither our nor local satellite imagery shows anything at all out of the usual. No ruined structures like the castle … no gated off private streets or anything like that."

"Hypothesis?"

"They've ... shifted a whole street out of phase?" Minerva sounded apologetic. "That's about the only possibility I've calculated that is worth mentioning. Doesn't explain why there isn't a gap in the rest of the cities though, surely?"

Harry stood. "Field trip, I think."

"Understood. You will find one of the prepared cover identities on the desk in your quarters, along with covert comms and sensor gear."

"Thank you. What about - "

"You will find an appropriate outfit as well."

Harry eyed the hologram as he turned in the doorway. "I know I don't have any 'Earth clothes' … where did you get them? Or do I not want to know?" His usual attire, when not playing at Jaffa, was the black bodysuit that formed the underlayer of his armour, with black combat trousers and boots for his sense of decorum's sake that were quick to get out of should he need to get into his equipment quickly. The bodysuit was made out of a 'smart fabric,' temperature-controlled and very comfortable, but also clearly not run-of-the-mill street clothing.

"Beamed them out of a few storage warehouses that didn't have lifesigns or cameras inside." Minerva shrugged. "I don't think Messers Marks or Spencer will miss them."

"Let's not make a habit of stealing, shall we?" Harry said rhetorically as he turned to leave again.

"So … you don't mind me hacking into classified databases, but lifting some jeans from Marks and Sparks is taboo?" Minerva's image followed him on the projector pads from the cockpit, through Operations and down the steep stairs into the crew quarters deck. "Double standards much?"

"The CIA, NSA or whoever will never detect your intrusion. What did you describe hacking their most encrypted servers like again?"

"Like trying not to look through an open window that's right in front of me."

"Exactly. But the M&S thing is _physical_ evidence. They might catch it in a check of their inventory. Even if they don't know what happened, there'll be a record. And if you do it too much, there'll be a pattern. And that means someone can track us, or at least where we were or what we wanted. Admittedly, they'd have to be bloody smart to do so, but such people do exist, and the data will be out there."

"Paranoid much?"

"Operational security is about making sure you cross every t and dot every i. There is no issue too small, and no detail too insignificant. If we get complacent, someone will hand Ra our heads on a platter." Harry paused. "Well, _my_ head, anyway. You don't have one, after all."

"Oh, I'm not worried then."

"Not funny."

* * *

_August 3rd, 1995_

The next day, dressed in casual clothes - jeans and a dark jacket - and wearing glasses - actually a heads up display, since he didn't need them any more The energy readings had led him to a disused shop front slightly further up the street, between a bookshop and a record store. At least, it had appeared disused as he approached, and to Minerva from orbit. As he stepped to within a few yards of the door, however, the blank hanging sign had suddenly become an image depicting, of all things, a figure in a pointy hat stirring a cauldron over a fire … with a leak.

Minerva had questioned his sanity, as she had seen nothing. Regardless, Harry had fallen back, unwilling to charge ahead without more information - there was something clearly odd about that building. Across the street he had set up a covert camera of the same type he was using to watch the 'Gates, to give Minerva a better viewing angle than from orbit, and waited.

And waited.

Stakeout … was … boring …

They were on the second day of stakeout when they finally got a hit. A very short and oddly dressed man hopped off at a bus stop just up the road, clearly leading a small family - parents and a daughter - towards the store. Harry was sat at an outdoor table of a pub called 'The Porcupine' on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Great Newport Street, appearing to be using his phone, the remains of a sandwich in front of him. There was a large volume of foot and vehicle traffic, and the Porcupine seemed a popular place for a quick lunch break, so he blended in without difficulty.

_About eleven years old. _Harry knew Minerva would be recording everything, so he didn't need to do anything as obvious as take surveillance photos. _About when I got my letter. _His eyes narrowed, watching the little group like a hawk as they approached the storefront … and went in, the short man ushering the others through in front of himself like he knew the place.

"_What just happened from your angle?"_ Minerva asked in his earpiece.

Harry raised the phone as if talking into it, but spoke quietly anyway. "What do you mean?"

"_They just vanished as they crossed the threshold of the door. One moment, they're stepping through, then they're gone. Completely vanished, even from thermal. The storefront is glass; even though it's got sheets over it the thermal camera should be able to see through."_

"That's odd. I could see both the kid and the father inside as the door swung shut. Have another look, frame by frame."

"_Checking_." It took about a second. "_Best as I can describe, there's a line, exactly where the door is. There's several frames as each person steps through where they appear to be cut in half. Each person's entry is marked by a very slight uptick in subspace energy from that exact spot, but that uptick is so small that it's well within the statistical baseline we've already measured. If it hadn't happened exactly as each person stepped through the door, I wouldn't even mention it." _

"What did you make of the guy in the lead?"

"_Achrondoplasiac dwarfism, perhaps?" _

"Perhaps, but I meant what he was wearing."

"_Three piece with bow tie, moustache, very old-fashioned round frame glasses. Might have been a popular look in the 1930s, but very anachronistic now."_

"Options?"

"_Wait and watch, or go in behind them right now."_

"Keep watching. Start running every test you can think of."

So watch they did.

Several more groups passed through, all with a set of parents and an eleven-year old child - one more that morning with a tall, thin woman with a severe expression and grey hair pulled back in a bun, dressed in a long, old-fashioned dress, and another two in the afternoon, both women again. One was Caucasian, with dark red hair and a scarlet cloak of all things, with a similar severe expression to the previous guide, and the second was a dark skinned woman in similarly odd clothing but in yellow-gold fabric, which could be taken for a traditional African outfit of some kind. It certainly looked somewhat less out of place than the other three persons' century-out-of-date apparel.

"Anything, Minerva?"

"_I can still detect lifesigns within about two metres of the edge of the subspace field. Beyond that the interference causes them to fade out. I've also noticed that no-one on the street seems to even look at the storefront, let alone go inside."_

"It is abandoned, or appears to be so. Why would they look at it?"

"_I'm an AI, Harry. I've analysed the line-of-sight of every passer-by in the nearly forty-eight hours the camera's been there. Apart from the four groups who've gone in, not a single person even so much as _looks_ at the store. Doesn't that strike you as odd?"_

"It does. And there's no graffiti on it, which I would expect for an abandoned storefront in this neighbourhood. Do you think it's possible that there's some kind of attention-diverting effect in place. Could they … actually create a 'someone else's problem' field?"

"_You need to stop reading Douglas Adams."_

"When you can build me a Point of View gun that works on the Goa'uld, you can tell me to stop reading Hitchhiker's Guide because then I'll be living it. Until then, I'll read what I like. Have you devised any way of seeing through the interference?"

"_Possibly, but I need readings from inside the field. I don't think silicon-based electronics will fare very well with the EM interference being given out, though. Crystal and neutronium based systems are unaffected by EMP effects, but I can't tell if they'll work inside this."_

"Got it. I'm coming back up to the ship, and I'll go in tonight with some equipment."

* * *

_August 5th_

In the very early hours of the next morning, Harry eased open the door to the storefront. He wore the same as before, only underneath a black cloak Minerva procured from who knows where; it seemed the best thing to blend in without being restrictive.

Since the letter said school didn't start until 1st September, and it was only a few days after the same date Harry had received his own letter back in 1991, then it wasn't unreasonable to believe these 'guides' were people responsible for helping newcomers - or the newcomers' children - find their way into this 'hidden society,' to help them get the school supplies, assuage their worries about this new and unfamiliar turn in their lives.

The inside of the store was … Harry blinked, remaining in the door for a second to take stock before moving further inside.

It was a pub, and quite clearly not a store of any kind. A bar at one end with, with tables occupying the rest of the floorspace; one long trestle for large groups, presumably, and smaller round ones for individuals. A number of dark archways marked either other rooms or alcoves in the walls. A fireplace at the far end from the bar was dark, but clearly saw a lot of use. The whitewashed walls were uneven and somewhat shabby, marked by age and smoke from the fire, and were hung with a large number of picture frames.

It was clearly an old structure; much older than it appeared from the outside. The exposed oak beams and whitewashed walls were characteristic of Tudor architecture, while the exterior matched the late 1870s Victorian style of the rest of the street. Someone had kept the camouflage up to date, even if the inside remained the same.

Harry could ... _feel_ something in the air … the subspace field, he theorised; it was disconcerting, though, like a sixth sense he didn't realise he'd had up until that point. He supposed made sense; since 'magic' was the source of his powers, it didn't seem unreasonable that he would be able to peripherally sense the enormous strength of the apparently permanent field he'd just entered.

He moved slowly across the room, sticking to the shadows; the clear moonlight lit up patches of the room through the windows even in the darkened room, and he avoided those patches.

"Sitrep," he muttered to Minerva, who was also watching through the camera on his fake glasses.

"_Some subspace interference." _The AI's voice was crackly, slightly disconcerting on the usually crystal-clear communicator._ "Give me a moment to compensate. Your lifesign just vanished from sensors, just like the others, but I'm still getting telemetry from the equipment and health monitor you're carrying."_

An abrupt noise from Harry's left caused him to take a quick glance around, looking for a hiding place. Too late.

A door off to one side of the bar banged open, just a couple of metres from where Harry stood, revealing a hunchbacked figure holding a stick with a glowing tip, pointed at Harry.

"Who're you then, and why're you sneakin' around?"

Shielding his eyes from the bright light, Harry thought quickly. He'd already noted that the parents and kids with their guides didn't come _out_ again through the Charing Cross door he'd just come through, and the subspace field that this pub appeared to act as the entrance to was far larger than any such establishment would ever require … both of which would imply this was a front, and he could be …

"Just passing through." There. Sufficiently vague but hopefully precise enough to avoid further questions, like …

"At this time'a the night?" The hunchbacked figure twitched the stick up a fraction. "Wait a minute … _that scar!"_

Harry's eyes widened, then narrowed. In his ear, Minerva said quietly, "Unexpected."

The figure continued, unaware of the response he had just incited. "You're Har - "

Harry was already moving, drawing his weapon - a silvery particle pistol, barrel glowing with red energy - from a concealed holster under the jacket and cloak. One quick step had him within arms reach of the man's arm, pushing the stick up and away from himself with his left hand, and he pushed the muzzle up under the man's chin, forcing him backwards into the low room behind the bar, which turned out to be a private sitting room. A door at the back led to a bedroom, and another probably to a bathroom. Which meant it was probably the owner's own rooms, and that meant the man in front of him was the proprietor.

Harry heeled the door shut as he passed and used his superior height and weight to back the man up against the wall. The light from his stick, now illuminating both of them, revealed him to be a completely bald, hunchbacked, wrinkled old man, eyes now wide in fright.

"Now," Harry growled quietly, putting as much menace into his voice as he could - which was quite a bit, as Martouf was a good teacher, "instead of blurting out whatever you were about to say to the whole world to hear, why don't you finish what you were going to say … quietly."

"Umm …" The man burbled, eyes flickering between the scar, still clearly visible, and Harry's cold green eyes. The sharp light of the stick-thing from one side threw the far side of his face into shadow, giving him a particularly intimidating look. "You're … _Harry Potter?"_ The last part was in a whisper, and in his uncertainty, phrased as a question.

"And what does that name mean to you?"

"You're … the Boy-who-lived! The one who defeated the Dark Lord, You-know-who! Fifteen years ago! T-t-t-there was a big hooh-ha a few years ago when you were found to have disappeared! Right around the time you were supposed to attend Hogwarts!"

_Dark Lord? And no, I don't know who - if he tells me it's Sauron, I'm walking out and never coming back. _

"Define, 'a big hooh-ha'?"

"The M-ministry put out an international notice to all the other ministries that you had gone missing. The A-a-aurors were out searching the country for weeks."

_Interesting, confirmation of the international organisation at least. Aurors … searching … equivalent to police or army maybe?"_

"Why all the attention?"

"Y-you don't know?"

Harry relaxed a bit of pressure. "If I did, would I be asking?"

"Well … when you were just a baby, you killed the worst Dark Lord we'd ever had. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named killed hundreds, but when he tried to kill you, the spell reflected. No one really knows what happens, but you were found in a half-destroyed house, with _his_ clothes and wand next to your crib, with _that scar_ on your forehead."

_He-who-must-not-be-named? They won't even say his name? Must have been bad. And 'the worst Dark Lord we've ever had' … are they a regular occurrence?_

"Okay." No, it was most certainly _not_ bloody okay, Harry didn't understand a thing, but he was just going to have to roll with it. "So who are you?"

"I'm Tom … Tom Dickinson ... I own and run the Leaky Cauldron."

"The pub?"

"That's right."

"All right." Harry slowly removed his weapon. "I apologise for manhandling you, Tom. I don't like being surprised."

"That's … fine." Tom rubbed his jaw, apparently forgetting the fact Harry had been the one sneaking around _his_ property.

"Now," Harry gestured at the sitting room couch, but didn't holster his pistol, keeping it slightly out of sight beneath the ridiculous cloak. "I'm sorry about the late hour, but we need to have a talk."

"Now?" Tom put away the stick, and clapped his hands twice; the room's candles and fireplace bust into life. "I suppose … say … aren't you a little old?" The stick, light now extinguished, was in his hand again. "Harry Potter should be younger than you are."

Harry knew the age thing would come up. "Little accident along the way."

"Ah …" Tom relaxed, for some reason accepting that complete non-explanation at face value. "Ageing potion?"

"Something like that." Harry waited until the old barkeeper had seated before taking the chair facing the door. "I've been … away, for a few years. Kidnapped, actually, in 1991."

"So they were right?"

"Who?"

"The papers, the Daily Prophet, they've run with that theory ever since, although the Ministry never confirmed anything. The Quibbler had its own version, something about it being the 'Greys' that took you but no one paid any attention to old Xeno. He's a bit of a crackpot."

_Greys? Roswell Greys? Oh, this Xeno isn't quite as much of a crackpot as you think. I going to need to look into that. _

"Yeah. I got rescued, but stuck around with my rescuers for most of the last five years. I came back here to get some answers, about my family, and about … magic."

"Well, that a lot of things, but I'll do my best, Mr Potter."

For almost two hours, Harry listened to, and asked questions about the English magical world. He heard about his parents - _you look like your father, but you have your mother's eyes_ - what little Tom knew about their school days - _charmer, Lord Potter was, or so I heard, and your mother was one of the smartest students Hogwarts had ever had -_ and their sacrifice - _dead in a car crash, what a load of dragonshite, if you'll excuse my French. _

He did, eventually, get the name 'Lord Voldemort' out of Tom, but just the words clearly terrified the man, so he let it alone after that, turning to happier subjects, like Hogwarts - _grand old castle, up in Scotland - _and the Ministry - _most are good sorts, but more'n a few bad apples amongst them lot too -_ and some more recent history -_ heard some rumours about troubles up at Hogwarts these past few years, and there some stories in the Prophet, too._

Eventually, the old barkeeper rose to start his day, waving off Harry's apologies for keeping him up all night - _least I could do, young man, you needed to know these things_ - and led Harry into the back yard of his pub to show him the entrance into 'Diagon Alley.' Harry watched in barely concealed surprise at the retracting doorway and the street revealed on the other side - a street that clearly did _not_ appear anywhere in modern London. Fitting in with the Tudor style of the Leaky Cauldron, the Alley was a ramshackle collection of shale-roofed structures, some leaning at some improbable angles. It had a certain charm, however, even dark and deserted as it was.

"Thank you, Tom." Harry said as he stepped through, then turned back. "If you don't mind, one more favour."

"Of course, Mr Potter."

"Don't tell anyone I was here. Not your friends, family, or even people you trust. I don't like attention, and I'd rather stay under the radar for the moment."

"Under the what?"

"Uh … never mind. I'd just like to stay hidden for the moment."

"Well, certainly, I suppose. I was planning on telling Dumbledore, the Headmaster. Back when you first went missing he asked me to keep an eye out, if you ever wandered in. A long shot, he called it at the time, but said he was trying to cover every possibility."

_Why would a school headmaster have anything to do with searching for me, if these Aurors were already at it? Although … he does have all those other titles, maybe that has something to do with it._

"Well, I've no idea who he is, so could you hold off on that please?"

"He's a good man, Mr Potter. Maybe a bit off his rocker, but a good man."

"I'm sure, but still. Tell you what, hold off on telling him for now, and when I've got my bearings, in a few days I'll come back and you can introduce him?"

Tom smiled, nodded and returned to his pub, leaving Harry alone in the entirely deserted Alley. It was still half-five in the morning, after all.

"Minerva?" The AI had stayed quiet throughout the conversation, either letting Harry get on with it uninterrupted, or because she was cut off by the subspace field. Harry wasn't terribly worried; all he had to do was leave via the Charing Cross entrance, but it would hamper his recon if Minerva couldn't analyse things on the fly for him.

"_Still with you, Harry."_ Her voice was still getting interference, but it was better than before. _"I've compensated as much as I can without making some hardware changes. Better EMP shielding should do it, but that can wait. I'm getting telemetry from all the audio-visual surveillance devices you're wearing, but I'm still not getting any sensor readings or lifesigns from outside the zone. I know you're there, but I can't see you there. It's a bit disconcerting, how well these barriers work."_

"No equipment disruption?"

"_The silicon-based kit you took in to test my theory is all frozen up or fried completely. The crystal tech is working, albeit at slightly reduced efficiency and clarity of signal, and the communication signal is a bit scratchy as you can tell."_

"Transporter?"

"_Can't lock on without a lifesign. Turn on the transponder beacon." _

Harry tapped a small black box on his belt that immediately showed a little red LED, indicating it was active. "Done."

"_Signal received." _Minerva sounded relieved. _"Anything you want transported from inside a subspace field will need to be tagged with a beacon. We've only got that one you're wearing and ten spares in storage though. Use them carefully." _

"Put it on the resupply list. What about transporting in?"

"_Won't be possible unless there's an active beacon to lock onto." _

"Give me a minute." Harry looked around, and spotted a narrow side alley between two buildings, which he entered. "Transport one of the spare beacons and a 'Gate camera out of storage to me."

The two devices appeared in a white flash at his feet. Minerva had clearly made her best guess at ground level, working off the beacon on his belt and his known height, but was off by a few inches. Both fell and bounced with a clatter that made Harry wince, but didn't seem to attract any attention.

"I'll find a good spot to set these up, then we'll have our own private entry point."

"_Good thinking. That Leaky Cauldron entrance is an obvious ambush point if someone worked out it was the only way you knew to get into this 'Diagon Alley.' And what a name! I bet these people think they're a right laugh."_

"Start working on a design for some kind of recon drone, something we can slip inside these fields without actually having to physically infiltrate them." Harry ordered, making his way down the aforementioned Alley. "Give it a beacon, because the present ones don't have that … maybe a beacon that can be dropped off, and the usual sensor and surveillance capabilities."

"_I'll have it done by this evening." _

It took a while, but Harry eventually found an apparently unused little space, barely wider than the side alley that led to it, behind 'Madame Primpernelles' Beautifying Potions.' The transponder, now active, went on the ground behind a trash can, while the camera he just levitated up slightly above head height, the powerful adhesive backing attaching it to the brick wall of the adjoining building. From there the wide-angle lens could watch the transport area and detect if anyone would see his arrivals … or be waiting in ambush for him.

That done, Harry beamed back to the _Raven_, to go over the considerable amount of information Tom had imparted to him.

* * *

"That went well." Minerva said after Harry had returned, and quickly skimmed over the 'Goa'uld Watch' reports.

"It did." Harry leaned back in the desk's chair. "Objective has been confirmed to exist, and located. Covert transport through the barrier is established, and a friendly local contact met. But there are some considerable issues to be surmounted."

"Indeed there are." Minerva smirked, "Like the fact that despite having never heard of these people and having spent most of the last five years off the grid in a different galaxy, even if they don't know that, you are _still_ a major celebrity for something you _have no recollection of_."

"Messed up, isn't it?"

"Beyond all belief."

"But so very … human, as well." Harry mused. "A child makes the perfect hero, wouldn't you say? An innocent. No ... politics involved. A child is separated from all that, separated from any prejudices; people don't like a hero who has different opinions to theirs, and a baby doesn't have any opinions at all except wailing. Well," he amended, "any prejudices except the hatred of whoever supported Voldemort, presumably. In reality, either something entirely different happened, or I was just a toddler who survived what no-one else had before. That doesn't make me anything except lucky."

"Harry … I'm sorry about your parents. I know you haven't believed the car crash story your relatives fed you for several years, but this is …"

"Unexpected, I know. And you don't need to say anything, Min. You weren't even initialised at the time. And their sacrifice, for me … without even knowing about it, I think I've taken a pretty good first few steps towards making sure my parents' deaths weren't in vain. Knowing their story just makes me want to be even more worthy of it. Besides, from what Tom says, Voldemort's no longer around for me to track down and terminate with extreme prejudice. Which is a shame, but probably for the best, for me. Revenge, although poetic, isn't the most … stable motivation."

"Yes, I'm glad you recognise that, and I agree; freeing a galaxy would be a fitting legacy for Lily and James' son."

"Glad you think that, because you're going to be right there for all of it."

"Probably going to be _doing_ most of it, too." Minerva shot back with a smirk.

"What_ever_. Something interesting just occurred to me though."

"Oh?"

"Tom referred to my father as a Lord."

"He did … I wonder where we can find out more about that. Your father's name isn't in the non-magical peerage list; do you think there's a whole separated magical nobility? Does the Crown have any influence?"

"It's not really important for now. I'll keep looking around Diagon Alley later, and try to get some background on this Dumbledore guy. Have you had a look on the other side?"

"It's an odd name. I've got a reference to a 'Dumbledore,' no first name given, in some old documents dating to the Second World War, but only in passing."

"Context?"

"Minutes of a meeting between Eisenhower and some of his senior commanders shortly after the Battle of the Bulge, re-discovered in an archive and declassified in the late 1970s, converted to electronic format just two years ago. The impression I get is that this Dumbledore was some kind of high-level independent agent or commando, perhaps SOE, or maybe a spymaster in control of such agents. The exact line, spoken by Eisenhower, is_ 'Dumbledore says he can maybe disrupt their logistics, but it's not his primary objective, and he doesn't want to break his peoples' cover unless it's critical.' _Patton responds with derision, saying that he still can't believe Eisenhower is putting up with 'that crackpot old fool.' Montgomery moves the conversation onto something else. That's it."

"Interesting ... you think it's this 'Albus Dumbledore's' father?"

"It's a distinct possibility."

"Well, we can ask him in a few days," Harry decided. "It probably isn't relevant, but might indicate a magical component of World War Two that was completely out of the histories. Anway, ops plan for the next few days; Diagon Alley again later, just to get a feel for the place, then tomorrow we'll check out that castle in Scotland that Tom all but confirmed was Hogwarts itself."

* * *

Harry decided to catch a few hours sleep before returning, so it was midday by the time he reappeared in the Alley, and it was a remarkably different place. Bustling crowds filled the street, dressed in odd, old-fashioned clothing, apparently based around what those in 'the real world' would refer to as academic robes, but rather more creative in their colouring, and usually worn over even more old-fashioned three-piece suits or, for the women, gowns and dresses of various period styles. Pointy hats, usually askew at the top, were also very much in evidence.

The stores, previously dark and drab, were as colourful as the people, selling all kinds of weird and wonderful substances, devices or, apparently, ingredients.

_Eye of newt and toe of frog, perhaps? Wool of bat and tongue of dog too somewhere, probably. I wonder if Shakespeare had some peripheral knowledge of the magical world ..._

Clearly 'magical' shops selling wands, cauldrons, and … flying broomsticks, apparently … were sited side by side with others selling rather more prosaic stationary, confectionery or clothing. Harry just leaned in the side-alley's entrance, unnoticed and unassuming - and his scar covered by an adhesive patch matched to his skin-tone. A few people glanced at him, but moved on. He had no specific plan, just to get used to the tone of the Alley and its people, the better to blend in and appear to be a local. Besides, from the transactions going on at some of the street stalls near him, he had none of the local currency. No way in hell those gold coins were Pounds Stirling.

He caught snatches of conversation from shoppers, but none of it seemed especially relevant. Then:

"In the Alley you'll find all of the stores required to purchase your supplies …"

The short teacher was back - Tom had confirmed him as Filius Flitwick, Charms Professor at Hogwarts, when Harry had asked some leading questions - with a different family in tow. As they passed, with the four-foot-nothing Professor playing tour guide, Harry detached himself from the wall and merged into the flow behind them, staying close enough to hear his high-pitched voice, which carried quite a way even with the throng.

A guided tour for newcomers would be rather useful.

After seeing the bank - _Gringotts, doesn't get any more reliable than the Goblins, you can get your muggle currency converted there_ - Ollivander's Wand Shop - _highest quality wand-maker in Britain -_ and seeing the rest of the Alley, Harry detached himself from that group when they started heading in to purchase their kid's school uniform at 'Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions,' heading back to transport site and thence to the _Raven_.

"More problems." Harry slid into the chair in the Ops room, turning to face Minerva's projection.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Operating budget - not just in this 'Wizarding world' with their crazy coins, but in the regular parts as well. What's the most secure way of holding funds here on Earth?"

"Most secure? Make lots of gold bars and put them in the cargo hold of the _Raven. _Difficult to pull off a heist in orbit."

Harry rolled his eyes. "That wasn't what I meant and you know it."

"You meant private, away from scrutiny. For that, a numbered account is probably what you're looking for. They're not completely private, but much more so than usual. Swiss and Austrian so-called 'offshore' banks specialise in this, as do other banking havens, as it's illegal in most jurisdictions. The Swiss banks in particular are noted for being very closemouthed about their clients' financial affairs. To open such accounts, they always require a physical meeting to verify identity. After that, they don't keep personal data on their clients beyond the bare minimum; if you have the right codes, you can access the account."

"Open accounts in all the banking havens you think are appropriate." Harry ordered. "Attract less attention, hopefully. Then target accounts belonging to … less reputable persons, shall we say. Columbian drug lords or terrorist groups, for example. Hack them and … appropriate some funding for this op. Do it in small increments, a penny here, a pound there. Or cents and dollars, probably. They'll probably notice eventually, but you can make it utterly untraceable, right?"

"Yes. I must say, those double standards are showing though again, Harry."

"True, I'm a hypocrite," Harry shrugged, "but it's for a good cause. Try to make sure no one will get hurt over this. Obviously I don't want this traced back to us, but I'd rather some other poor sap doesn't get the blame for it either. I suspect these … individuals might be more than a little annoyed if all their not-so-hard-earned cash goes missing suddenly. Can you make that happen?"

"I'll do my best. Scotland?"

"Yeah. Give me a topographic image."

One appeared over the central hologram table. "Hmm … have you figured out a way to compensate from outside the subspace field, so cameras can see in?"

"Not yet, and I'm not hopeful either. It's a very effective defence. Getting more readings from the Hogwarts' field might help, give me something to compare Diagon Alley too." Minerva shrugged. "You know my system isn't optimised for scientific analysis. I rely on interpreting data gathered by others for that kind of thing, and no-one has ever encountered subspace fields like this before, let alone extensively analysed them."

"Yeah, I know, do your best." Minerva's system's weakness, if it could be called that, was what the Asgard scientists called 'progressive specialisation.' She spent the majority of her time and processing capacity running simulations of future galactic politics based on every possible variable imaginable, and was now also updating them constantly with the information the new surveillance network was gathering.

The longer she spent doing that, the better she got at it, just like a human doing the same job; the ability to learn was a function of her sentience, artificial though she was. However, although Minerva was, in human terms, a genius in many areas including the sciences, that didn't make her omniscient. Her lack of specialisation in and therefore lack of experience in scientific analysis, however, meant she was incapable of making intuitive leaps of logic that might occur to a scientifically specialised AI, and visa versa.

"Okay, we'll work around that. I'm going to do this in armour, with an enhanced sensor module. Three objectives for tonight: first, to verify that this is indeed Hogwarts, and my ability to physically access it. Second, I want to get a more sensitive sensor pack inside one of these fields, to get better readings, and third, to test whether or not the armour's computers are affected, just in case I need to fight _in_ one of these fields. Insertion point … here." Harry tapped a spot on the image. "I'll carry an active transponder beacon at all times."

"Understood."

* * *

A flash of light announced the arrival of a heavily armoured figure at the foot of the enormous, ancient conifers of one of the few remaining Scottish forests, by the side of a small stream.

A few small creatures scattered at his appearance, but after checking his sensors and a visual scan, Harry determined he was alone. He made his way north-east, downhill towards the lake that Hogwarts Castle was apparently built next to.

The Castle's subspace field was considerably stronger than that of Diagon Alley, although apparently with different effects as they could still see it - a ruined version anyway - from orbit. Since 'Castles' usually meant 'defended,' Harry had decided to don full armour.

The armour was, quite possibly, a greater technological feat than the compact, lethal design of the _Raven_. It was multi-layer system, the closest thing to powered battle armour Harry could manage without an actual full-on exoskeleton. It could shrug off the Jaffa's zat'nik'tel blasts without difficulty, and the outermost centimetre-thick plates of trinium-carbon alloy gave decent - but unfortunately imperfect - protection against the high-velocity, high-temperature plasma shots of staff weapons ... so although being hit by one of those would likely be highly unpleasant and/or capable of maiming him, he'd probably survive.

Heavy-calibre gunfire too would be uncomfortable but survivable; if an Earth military force tried to take him down for some reason, they'd need anti-tank missiles or light artillery at least.

The true advantage of the armour was not, however, in the advanced protection - although that was very welcome - but the incredible tactical and situational awareness it imparted; it wasn't just protection for him, but for the in-built sensors and the computer systems that linked Minerva to it as well. With her aid, behind the full-face, featureless gloss-black visor Harry could 'see' in not just the visual spectrum, but in infra-red, thermographic, EM and - pending some so-to-be-applied upgrade - subspace spectra too, and she could display for him a wealth of relevant information, such as maps, intel, estimated enemy intentions and movements, health readouts for himself or others and more. Weapon telemetry also fed into the HUD, enabling him to aim reasonably accurately even when moving or in less-than-stable firing positions.

His weapons, too, would certainly make Earth's collective militaries drool. Harry was still field-testing a number of different designs, so tonight he carried a five millimetre railgun in a marksman's rifle configuration, with an under-barrel particle attachment. On low power, the multipurpose attachment would have the same stun effect as his sidearm; on the highest setting, which was considerably higher than the pistol was capable of, it would melt a six inch hole in rolled steel armour two inches thick. He would only get one shot out of the microfusion cartridge on that setting, however.

The hike down to the lake was interesting, but uneventful, even though he'd detoured around a rather large thermal signature that Minerva claimed was some kind of mutated super-arachnid. Harry hadn't wanted to stay around long enough to find out if the spider the size of a small house was friendly or not, so he'd taken the long route. Investigating _that_ could go on the to-do list. A long way down the to-do list.

Mild arachnophobia had _nothing_ to do with that decision, of course.

The castle was far from being a ruin. The silhouette of more than a dozen massive towers stood in stark relief against the yellow-red sunset on the western horizon, atop a huge cliff over the lake. Hogwarts Castle was actually more like several castles, Harry observed, as it was built on several different rock outcrops which were accessed by drawbridges or more solid stone arches.

"Minerva, you still seeing a ruin?" The AI would be observing through his helmet cam, and through the enhanced sensor suite he was carrying as a backpack module.

_"Yes. I take it you aren't?"_

"Far from it. I wonder if the illusion effect would still hold if I were to go inside it?"

_"Bit ambitious for tonight, wouldn't you say?"_

"Perhaps. Term's out, I doubt any students are around."

Harry retreated back into the forest to stay out of sight as he worked his way around the south and west sides of the lake; it was well past last light by the time he reached the nearest access detouring around a small, hut - the light and smoking chimney indicated occupation, hee was soon approaching a narrow, rickety covered bridge - so rickety, in fact, Harry couldn't work out how the thing was staying up - which led from a hillock bordered by large standing stones, over a chasm into a courtyard adjoining the castle proper.

Harry loitered at one end for a few moments, weighing up his options. He'd already done what he'd intended to do - confirm the existence of Hogwarts and his ability to get inside the subspace 'bubble' that - he'd thought - defended it, although it appeared to only be a camouflage effect. A very sophisticated one, to tell the truth, but not such an obstacle after all ... unless he was missing something.

There didn't seem to be any alert or opposition to his intrusion. Why not?

Minerva piped up half-way across the bridge, sounding rather more nervous than usual - and the comm signal was more degraded than usual too. _"Harry … silly question, perhaps … but what are you standing on?" _

Harry looked down, at the planks, then up, at the roof in confusion. "A bridge."

"_Ah. Good to know. To the camera, you appear to be standing on air."_

"So you still can't see the castle?"

"_Negative, just the ruins." _The AI's frustrated tone changed abruptly._ "Contact rear, forty metres and closing on the end of the bridge." _

Harry took off running, into the castle, aware that he was making considerably more noise than he could afford; the bridge was exposed, however, and whoever it was would have a direct line of sight to him in just a few seconds.

The bridge ended in the middle of one side of a courtyard; directly opposite, on the far side was a massive and imposing set of wooden doors. Harry dodged right, slipping behind a pillar. There were no other decent hiding places; the only other exit from the courtyard were the wooden doors, clearly shut.

Heavy, stomping steps announced the arrival of the contact, who soon appeared from over the bridge.

"I could'a sworn there was somethin' there," he muttered. Even without looking Harry could tell this guy was probably very large; to describe his voice as 'bass' would be understating it, and his footsteps on the shaky bridge had sounded like near-seismic events.

Harry slid his hand down to the under-barrel stunner, and turned the power up slightly above the 'normal' stun setting. It really wasn't the introduction to Hogwarts he'd had in mind, but he didn't want to get caught sneaking around either.

"Hmm. Must'a been nothin'." He stomped away across the courtyard, and Harry manoeuvred quietly along below the low wall until he felt he could risk a look. He nearly swore out loud - the man wouldn't have heard anything, because of the sealed helmet, but he suppressed the urge. Nonetheless …

The heavyweight guy was more than just heavyweight, he was fucking _huge._

"How big _is_ that guy?" He asked Minerva. A box opened on his visor, tagging the man with an amber target icon, for unknown/civilian … and providing a box of 'vital stats' as provided by the armour's sophisticated sensors. At reasonably close range they could determine all kinds of useful things, like species, presence of a Goa'uld symbiote, whether or not they were armed, detecting tells if someone was lying, etcetera. Since most Milky Way non-human sentient races were humanoid, and quite a few could pass for human - or hijack them, for that matter - the first two of those were critically important.

_"Very,"_ was Minerva's deadpan reply._ "The helmet cam's working properly. I think you passed through the camouflage layer. That castle is very impressive."_

"That it is." Harry said, still focused on the giant. This guy was _eleven_ _and a half_ feet tall; his internal skeletal structure and organ placement indicated he was human, but his muscle density was twice that of a baseline human. "What else can you tell me?"

"_Tallest human known to have lived was only eight foot eleven, this guy is significantly more than that. Maybe some kind of mutation due to magic? He doesn't seem to be suffering from any of the health issues connected to gigantism."_ Minerva replied speculatively. _"And that doesn't explain the extra muscle density." _

The tall man reached the doors and called out, _"Draco dormiens!" _

_"Draco?_ That's not an Alteran word but _dormiens_ is 'sleeping'."

"_Dragon, Harry. It's Latin, not Alteran." _

"Oops, sorry. I wonder if it's just a voice password, or actual voice recognition? No way to tell right now; what's the readout on the 'magical' interference?"

"_It's been steadily getting worse since you crossed into the field, and began increasing exponentially as you crossed the bridge." _

"Estimated distance until I lose contact with the _Raven_?" Harry really didn't want that; the armour's major advantage was the link to Minerva. With her managing the systems, she was quite literally the eyes in the back of his head, and provided the answers, when she could, to the weird and wonderful … or _bloody dangerous_ things the universe might throw at him.

"_Fifty metres." _

"Can you track the source of the disruption? We've been moving around the perimeter for a while, can you use that to triangulate?"

"_Not yet. Subspace energy sources aren't usually this … messed up. I know I said the crystal computers fared better than silicon, but that didn't mean they were working perfectly. The strength of the subspace interference around this place isn't just interfering with broadcast signals, but the internal crystalline components as well, which is making things difficult. Give me a few minutes to crunch the numbers." _

"Alright." Harry watched as the heavy oaken doors swung shut behind the giant man with a resounding, echoing bang. It certainly fit the ambience of the place. "I've seen enough for tonight. I'll set up a camera on the door. Beacon in the woods still working?" Harry had dropped another beacon in the forest, at the closest point to the castle that was still in heavy cover.

"_Yes, it is."_

"Good. I realise I haven't exactly done much tonight, but time is on our side for this. Beam up."

* * *

"What's the next move?" Minerva asked, as Harry reappeared in the cargo bay.

"Well, how's the funding coming?"

"You have an appointment in Zurich to open a numbered account tomorrow morning, zero-nine-hundred local time, which is one hour in front of UK time. Obviously, they require verification of your actual existence before creating the account, even if they don't ask any questions about you afterwards. You have similar appointments at two-hour intervals in Luxembourg, Austria and the Cayman Islands, in that order. The first two are in the same time zone as Zurich, and the Cayman Islands one is at fifteen hundred Zurich time, zero-eight-hundred local."

"Lovely." Harry grimaced. "Meetings with bankers. All day. Such fun."

"Stop complaining. You just go and open the accounts, and I'm going to make you rich. Just sit back and enjoy one of the biggest … and most boring heists in Earth's history."

* * *

_August 6th, 1995_

The Zurich appointment went smoothly. Minerva's flawless false identities, this time passing Harry off as 'Steven Johnson,' a young software entrepreneur who'd struck gold in the booming internet phenomenon, were examined and approved without comment.

She had constructed a detailed backstory for him, and had pre-infiltrated the bank's network so that when they ran their background check, not only the basic, expected information like school and employment records showed up, but also news articles about his 'innovative company,' that aforementioned company's - fake - website and even a false contact number in New York. A similar scene played out in the three other appointments, all under different identities.

Minerva was targeting the six largest Columbian and Mexican drug cartels, an Albanian sex trafficking ring and Hong Kong's _Sun Yee On, _some of the most violent brutal criminal networks in the world … and the Dursley family, whose accounts she drained all the way down to a basic subsistence level in one go. The Dursley family's savings were quickly pinballed through the financial system to hide the trail, winding up in Zurich Cantonal's account just a few minutes after Harry left.

Why? Well, if Vernon Dursley were to go to the authorities, they would of course have to have access to his financial records to investigate … which would reveal the not-inconsiderable amount of money he had embezzled from Grunning's Drills.

The money transfers against the criminal groups were more subtle, facilitated not by a brute-force hack but the actual, correct passwords, which meant the original banks had no reason to doubt their authenticity. Minerva's interference, however, meant that the transactions - which would normally require the bank be notified in advance or otherwise take several hours or even days to be approved, were done so instantly and without alerting either the bank staff or the account holders, as she was faking the relevant authorisation procedures from both ends.

She had bounced the transfers through a large number of dummy regular accounts and front corporations, the amounts far too small for anyone to take notice of - international banking regulations only required the reporting of transfers over ten thousand dollars.

Each of the gangs in question maintained hundreds of accounts and invested in dozens of businesses of varying legality, and that wasn't counting the senior gang members' own personal accounts, which were also fair game. Stealthily, money began disappearing as Harry had suggested: a cent there, a dollar there. By the time the Triads noticed - always the most organised of the eight - six weeks had passed. By the time the Albanians had cottoned on, eighteen _months_ had passed, and Minerva had diverted a sum total of two hundred and seventy _million_ US dollars from all of them. As a finale, she phoned in some anonymous tips to local law enforcement, just to keep them on their toes.

AIs were so very, very useful to have around.

Even though several of these gangs cooperated with each other on a regular basis, none found out about the others' misfortune; all chose to conceal their loss so no one might think them weak, and try to move in on their turf. They did each try to track down the thief independently, but Minerva was far, far too smart for that. No electronic evidence was left, no trail of transfers for anyone to follow.

Various law enforcement organisations also eventually heard; they were not without their own sources on the inside. Once they were done having a good laugh at their enemies' expense, they too did their best to track down the hacker or hackers who pulled this off, less they strike again at a more legitimate target. However, even with INTERPOL coordinating, the investigation went nowhere.

Late that afternoon, Harry returned to the Alley that afternoon to convert some non-magical currency into the Galleons, Sickles and Knuts Tom had explained to him. Equipped a satchel full of cash - formerly belonging to the Dursley's, which had made him laugh at Minerva's well-deserved revenge on his behalf - and a chequebook, Harry went straight to Gringotts.

Half an hour later he was the proud owner of a bottomless wallet - some sort of pocket dimension effect, Harry was sure, although he could't think how it would be maintained without some sort of power source - and several thousand galleons. He hadn't really analysed the prices the day before, so he deliberately took more than he expected to need.

He shouldn't have worried. With only about half an hour before the stores in the Alley closed, he bought some bland, generic, off the shelf wizarding clothes from a second hand store - the cloak was adequate, but a bit ridiculous in midsummer - and the basic, First year spell books and other volumes of recent magical history, explaining truthfully enough that the latter were for personal interest, and glibly lying that the rest were for a younger brother.

He'd then returned to the Leaky Cauldron, to pick up a copy of the Daily Prophet. Tom spotted him reading it and came over; further to being a goldmine of information the day before, Tom turned out to be a collector, with scrapbooks of Prophet articles dating back nearly since he started running the pub several decades before. He'd leant Harry his books for 1975-92, covering the war which took his parents' lives, and the fallout from its ... unexpected resolution, and 1991-3 which included his 'abduction' and the aftermath of that, too. Harry suspected Tom was going to be an incredibly useful connection to have - the Cauldron was a popular establishment, and bartenders often heard more than their customers thought.

That done, Harry returned to the Raven to pore over his new sources, to catch up on the basics of this society, so he didn't appear to be a total idiot when he started poking around deeper inside.

* * *

_August 8th_

Harry returned to the Leaky Cauldron at a rather more appropriate hour than the middle of the night, entering through the Charing Cross door at about three in the afternoon, well after he judged the lunch rush to be over. It was a weekday, and as he'd observed few other eating establishments in the Alley he'd had to assume the Cauldron would be very busy during that time; taking Tom away from his patrons during such at time would have attracted attention.

He quickly made his way towards the bar, catching Tom's eye. The old barkeeper made the greet him, but stopped just in time as Harry made a short chopping motion with his hand, then pointed at the door to Tom's sitting room. The bald man nodded, and waved at one of his servers.

"Hey, Lizzie, mind the bar for me would you?" The selected woman yelled an acknowledgement as she carried an improbably high stack of plates into the kitchen, and Tom motioned him in without waiting for her to return.

"Thank you, Tom. I'll try to keep this short."

"Not a problem, Mr Potter. Busy time's over, Lizzie can handle it. Do you want to meet Dumbledore?"

"Yes, please, Tom." Harry smiled conspiratorially. "Don't tell him who I am, just that he should meet me. Should be a bit of a laugh."

"Ah, you're much like your father Mr Potter, that sounds exactly like something he'd do."

Tom moved to the fireplace, and Harry watched with well-contained surprise as he threw some powder into the flames, which turned them green as he said loudly "Hogwarts Headmaster's Office!" ... and then with barely-concealed horror as the old man _stuck his head into the fire. _Only the fact Tom seemed to think this completely normal prevented Harry from yanking him back out again.

Harry only heard Tom's side of the conversation. "Headmaster Dumbledore? … absolutely fine, Headmaster, no complaints … well, I happen to have someone here who needs to speak to you … I promised not to say, sir, who knows who might be listening, but I can promise it'll be worth your time … certainly … do you want to come to the Cauldron, or for me to send him on through? … Certainly, just a moment."

Tom pulled his head out - unburned, Harry was glad to see - and motioned to Harry to … enter the fireplace? Harry just gave him a dubious look, which Tom quickly understood.

"It's the Floo system. You toss in a pinch of the powder, say your destination and step in. You pop out the other end, a bit sooty but most certainly alive." Tom smirked. "Might take a while to get used to."

"Of that, I have no doubt." Harry took a pinch. "And the destination is … Hogwarts Headmaster's Office, I assume?"

"Yes."

"Okay." Harry took a breath. _How insane is my life going to become. _"Hogwarts Headmaster's Office!"

* * *

The other end of the 'Floo' spat Harry out with considerably more velocity than he went in, causing him to tumble out head over heels in a very undignified fashion.

_Take a while to get used to, my foot._ It was not the most impressive introduction to a man Harry judged to be one of the more influential members of 'magical society;' he'd hoped to get on the man's good side, get some help with catching up with the four years of learning he'd missed, here at Hogwarts.

"Are you quite all right down there?" said an amused voice. Harry looked up to see an elderly, grandfatherly-looking man with the longest and quite possibly the most ridiculous beard known to mankind in this entire galaxy. He looked down again, hiding his face, wanting to preserve the shock value of his identity for as long as he could. Tom had said Dumbledore had been strongly interested in finding him; and if a random pub owner could recognise him in seconds, Dumbledore probably wouldn't be far behind.

"Yes, thank you." Harry groaned as he pushed himself up. He suddenly realised that Minerva hadn't said anything yet; either he was close enough to the source of Hogwarts' subspace field that it was fully jamming the signal, or the Floo transit had done something similar. That was a pain, but Harry was perfectly capable of working without her advice for something like this. "First time."

"Ah." The man, whom Harry presumed was Albus Dumbledore, now sounded curious. "Floo is quite a common transport method. I'm rather surprised you haven't used it before."

"I'm new around here." Harry stood, and approached the desk, getting his first real impression of the office. It was a large, circular room, the walls covered alternately in heavily laden bookshelves and a large number of … moving … portraits, all of whom were now observing Harry with varying levels of interest. _That_ wasn't disconcerting at all. At the back of the room, left of Harry's exit point from the fireplace, was a large desk, behind which sat the bespectacled senior citizen - and apparently _crazy_ senior citizen, judging by his dress sense - Harry had come to meet.

"I must say …" Dumbledore began, twinkling eyes peering over his glasses, "it isn't often Mr Dickinson contacts me with such a cryptic message. Sometimes when Hagrid gets a little too drunk and someone needs to bring him home, but that's rather rare too. So, if I may ask, who are you, and why did Tom think it so important I speak with you?"

Harry reached up to his forehead, and with a quick movement pulled off the adhesive patch covering his scar. Dumbledore's eyes narrowed, then widened, and his jaw dropped; Harry would be willing to bet it was the first time in decades the old man had been genuinely and completely flabbergasted.

"So … I hear you've been looking for me, Mister Dumbledore?"

* * *

You know ... when I said the first version was just one long infodump ... this wasn't much better was it? Ah well, least I finally published something.

As always,** read and review please**. Constructive critiques and reviews I can engage with and debate stuff with you readers **make my day.** **HINT, HINT.**

Finally, updates will continue to be - ridiculously - slow, for this story and others I'm afraid. I have yet another training exercise in a few weeks, I'm entering my final year of Uni, and don't want to screw it up for writing stories that, while I enjoy writing very much, I am not making any money for! If anyone can offer me a publishing deal for an original fiction work that I haven't actually gotten around to writing yet, I would be grateful forevermore ... no one? Really? Oh well ...


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